The Book Eaters

Sunyi Dean

Tom Doherty Associates, Aug 2, 2022 - Fiction - 416 pages

Sunyi Dean's The Book Eaters is “a darkly sweet pastry of a book about family, betrayal, and the lengths we go to for the ones we love. A delicious modern fairy tale.”— Christopher Buehlman, Shirley Jackson Award-winning author

Truth is found between the stories we're fed and the stories we hunger for.

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 fairy tales 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.

At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

What people are saying

The Book Eaters

User Review  - Publishers Weekly

Dean’s unputdownable debut gives the phrase “voracious reader” a new, very literal meaning. Devon isn’t human. She and others like her live off eating books, and they retain all the knowledge they ...

The Book Eaters

User Review  - Book Verdict

In Dean's big, intriguingly premised debut, Devon is part of a venerable clan belonging to The Book Eaters—instead of food, they munch thrillers, romance, and, when they misbehave, dusty dictionaries ...

About the author

Sunyi Dean, author of The Book Eaters, is an autistic author of fantasy fiction. Originally born in the States and raised in Hong Kong, she now lives in Yorkshire with her children. When not reading, running, falling over in yoga, or rolling d20s, she sometimes escapes the city to wildswim in lonely dales.

Bibliographic information

• Title: The Book Eaters
• Author: Sunyi Dean
• Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates, 2022
• ISBN: 1250810191, 9781250810199
• Length: 416 pages
• Subjects: Fiction / Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Fiction / Fantasy / Contemporary; Fiction / Horror