For starters, normal book eaters are dysgraphic, which means that by the late 1990s/early 2000s, when the book is set, traveling abroad is virtually impossible due to the need for documents that the book eaters can’t easily acquire or fake. The book eaters’ stories say that they are the servants of the Collector, put on Earth to consume human knowledge and eventually return it, but these are just stories-so they’re like the Eternals, but without a way to contact the boss and with several distinct differences from normal humans that make blending in with them and modern society difficult: “remnants of an abandoned alien science project,” as one of the few human characters in the book puts it (Chapter 3). (Chapter 1)ĭean draws a shadowy world that exists alongside our own, populated with monsters of various kinds-the book eater patriarchs who control their descendants’ lives being more subtle than the everyday book eaters and mind eaters who populate Devon Fairweather’s life and her story. He suffered occasionally from eczema, especially in winter. The books she ate, the booze kept her sane, and the lotion was for Cai, her son.

These days, Devon only bought three things from the shops: books, booze, and Sensitive Care skin cream. That intrigue (further deepened by the excellent US cover, with art by paper and book artist Su Blackwell) was amply repaid just in the book’s first paragraph, one of the strongest I’ve read in recent SFF: A young book eater woman undertakes a desperate, violent quest to find a way to preserve her young mind eater son from a fate decreed by the six book eater Families of Britain: death, or servitude as a “dragon,” the enforcers of the book eater militia known as the knights. I was intrigued as soon as I read the description for The Book Eaters, Sunyi Dean’s debut novel.

The book eaters cover