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Piglet
Lottie Hazell
Doubleday, €17.50
This tale of a woman whose life falls apart when her fiancé reveals a devastating secret weeks before their wedding has popped up on many of this year’s recommended novel lists, so I was greatly looking forward to it.
Unfortunately, a major flaw in the central conceit of the book completely undermines what is a well-written debut.
Piglet is the childhood nickname given to the central character, a cookery book editor whose desperately aspirational tendencies make her hard to like. In millennial and Gen Z parlance, food is Piglet’s ‘love language’.
Her entire life is filtered through food and cooking — there is her job, how she uses cooking as a means of seeking validation, and to assuage her anxiety; there is also an implied eating disorder.
Piglet also uses food to flag the supposed inadequacies of her working-class origins in the Midlands,...