Sunyi Dean

Out on the Yorkshire Moors lives a secret line of people for whom books are food, and who retain all of a book’s content after eating it. To them, spy novels are a peppery snack; romance novels are sweet and delicious. Eating a map can help them remember destinations, and children, when they misbehave, are forced to eat dry, musty pages from dictionaries.

Devon is part of The Family, an old and reclusive clan of book eaters. Her brothers grow up feasting on stories of valor and adventure, and Devon—like all other book eater women—is raised on a carefully curated diet of fairytales and cautionary stories.

But real life doesn’t always come with happy endings, as Devon learns when her son is born with a rare and darker kind of hunger—not for books, but for human minds.

The Book Eaters is a contemporary fantasy debut. It’s a story of motherhood, sacrifice, and hope; of queer identity and learning to accept who you are; of gilded lies and the danger of believing the narratives others create for you.

Twenty-six stories that represent some of the best SF published anywhere in 2018; dreamlike glimpses of pristine worlds that will destroy us before we destroy them; stories of work-based friendships, mistrust and isolation; of alienation and othering; stories of slavery given an acceptable face through beautiful voice and the ever-present need to keep fighting injustice; stories of bodily choice being made a crime; stories of rebellions we thought we’d already had but need to have again. We have another end to childhood. And we have the murder of story itself, involving an AI…