Eat the Ones You Love

A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh from the acclaimed author of Spare and Found Parts and Other Words for Smoke. During a grocery run to her local shopping center, Shell Pine sees a 'HELP NEEDED' sign in a flower shop window. She's just left her fiancé, lost her job, and moved home to her parents' house. She has to make a change and bring some good into her life, so she goes inside and takes a chance. Shell realizes right away that flowers are just the good thing she's been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist who wrote the sign asking for help. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine. An orchid growing out of sight in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. His name is Baby, and the beautiful florist belongs to him. He's young, he's hungry, and he'll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats - nobody he eats - can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He adores her and wants to consume her, and will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves. This is a story about possession, and monstrosity, and working retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.

Sarah Maria Griffin's first novel, Spare and Found Parts, was published by Titan Books in Spring 2018 and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards that year. Her second, Other Words For Smoke, arrived in April 2019. Her collection of essays about emigration, Not Lost, was published by New Island Press in 2013. Her nonfiction has appeared in Winter Papers, Guts, The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times and more recently, in a weekly series about the internet for The Gloss Magazine. She was the recipient of an Arts Council Bursary for Literature in 2017 and 2018, and is a winner of the European Science Fiction Chrysalis Award. She was the Writer in Residence in Maynooth University in 2017/18, the DLR Writer In Residence in 2018/19. She tweets @griffski.