The Book Eaters

The Book Eaters is a fantasy novel by the British writer Sunyi Dean, published by HarperCollins in 2022. Its premise is a hidden people who eat books and retain everything they have read, so that a library is a meal and a childhood is a reading list.

Devon belongs to the Family, an old and reclusive clan living out on the Yorkshire Moors. The book eaters absorb the contents of whatever they consume, which makes spy novels a peppery snack and romance novels sweet, and lets a map eaten at the right moment be remembered later. Her brothers grow up on stories of valour and adventure, while she and the clan's other women are kept to a careful diet of fairy tales and cautionary tales.

Then Devon's son is born with a different hunger, one that takes human minds rather than printed pages. The novel follows her away from the Family's expectations and into the question of what she is willing to do to keep him fed and hidden. Dean writes the book eaters as an old bloodline with its own hierarchies, rules and appetites rather than as a single monster, and sets the story between the moors and the city.