Butter

Asako Yuzuki was born in Tokyo in 1981. She won the All Yomimono Award for New Writers for her story "Forget Me, Not Blue," which appeared in her debut novel, published in 2010. She won the Yamamoto Shugoro Award in 2015. She has been nominated multiple times for the Naoki Prize, and her novels have been adapted for television, radio, and film. Butter is her first novel published in English.

"[Asako] Yuzuki takes a thrilling look into female relationships, revealing the complex nature of modern-day social conventions pertaining to a woman's appearance and her place in the home, and enriching the proceedings with mouthwatering descriptions of food. Like the meals Yuzuki describes, this leaves the reader satiated." - Publishers Weekly

"The novel cleverly intertwines paeans to the pleasures of eating with indictments of Japan's standards for women."

- New Yorker

"An unputdownable, breathtakingly original novel about true crime, loneliness and female appetite in all its tricky, transgressive glory. I will be spoon-feeding Butter to every woman I know." - Erin Kelly, author of The Skeleton Key

"A delectable meditation on appetite, fatphobia and misogyny in modern Japan - Butter is a salty morsel with one hell of a bite." - Alice Slater, author of Death of a Bookseller

"An intriguing and unusual novel with a fresh perspective [that] defies categorization: part psychological exploration of misogyny and fatphobia, part social commentary on contemporary Japan and the roles and expectations of the women who live there." - Library Journal Advance Reviews

"Ambitious and unsettling ... a thought-provoking and surprisingly feelgood take on friendship, transgressive pleasures, and society's impossibly contradictory expectations of women." - Guardian

"Exuberant, indulgent romp of a novel ... Butter is a full-fat, Michelin-starred treat that moves seamlessly between an Angry Young Woman narrative and an engrossing detective drama and back again. Yuzuki has crafted an almost Dickensian cast of fleshy characters, with just as many surprise connections ... Let this book bring you under its spell." - The Times (UK)

"It'll make your mouth water." - Irish Independent