Lena’s body is no longer her own. It is occupied by a growing appetite, a hunger that demands to be fed. From inside her luxury apartment, Lena tries to appease it by gorging herself, day and night. Whole loaves of bread, protein shakes—tins of cat food if all else fails.
When Joan, an actress on the cusp of stardom, moves into the apartment above, Lena is quick to make friends. She soon finds herself in Joan’s orbit, enjoying the trappings of wealth and privilege, the kind she has always pined for. But with the hunger demanding more and more, Lena’s carefully constructed image of herself starts to unravel. And as her appetite veers into the inedible, she must fight to remember who she is.
Milk, Bread, Teeth is an unflinching exploration of dissatisfaction and disparity, a deliciously grim and transgressive tale that draws the reader into a frenzy of insatiable desire and consumption. It’s a propulsive, eerie novel inspired by Amy’s experiences with chronic illness and her place in publishing as a working-class woman.
Amy Twigg was born and raised in Kent, England, and now lives in Surrey. When her debut, Spoilt Creatures, was published in the UK in 2024, Amy was selected as one of The Observer’s Best New Novelists. The novel also won the Blue Pencil Agency (BPA) Pitch Prize and was longlisted for BPA’s First Novel Award and the Mslexia Novel Competition. Amy is an alumnus of the Curtis Brown Creative novel-writing course. Milk, Bread, Teeth is her second novel.