It’s nearly impossible to read Piglet, Lottie Hazell’s strange and richly layered debut, without craving something sweet—or something savory, depending on your preference.
As its cover, featuring a towering stack of sugared doughnuts, suggests, this novel is brimming with rich narratives of food, ingredients, and cooking lingo that will make any chef or home cook's heart go wild. But in Hazell’s world, meals are much more than sustenance—they’re narrative tools, symbolic markers, and emotional triggers that drive her protagonist’s search for meaning and identity.
The novel stems from Hazell’s PhD research on the role of food in 21st-century fiction. In Piglet, cooking, junk food, and even a show-stopping pyramid of profiteroles become metaphors for identity, class, and unfulfilled desires. At its core, the novel follows its titular character, a cookbook editor whose life teeters between control and chaos as her wedding approaches, forcing her to reconcile the fractured versions of herself she’s spent years curating.
“I think we see her being her most honest self when she’s eating food or thinking about food—when she’s considering what she truly wants,” Hazell explains. “It’s about following her desires, in a way that’s unencumbered by the mirrors other people hold up to her.”
The result is a surreal yet deeply relatable exploration of hunger—not just for food, but for acceptance, belonging, and self-realization. Piglet’s internal struggle is mirrored by her intense and often dysfunctional relationship with food: indulging, denying, craving, and controlling. Each meal serves as both a comfort and a confrontation, forcing her to reckon with her suppressed desires and social insecurities.
Hazell’s writing oscillates between sharp realism and dreamlike introspection, reflecting her protagonist’s tangled emotional state. In one moment, readers are immersed in a meticulously described kitchen scene; in the next, they’re swept into Piglet’s fragmented thoughts, where memory and reality blend like the ingredients in one of her carefully prepared recipes.
“I’m really interested in the extent to which the author can leave a blank space for the reader,” Hazell says. “I want them to fill the void with as much of their own preconceptions as possible. I love exploring that collaboration—how sparse a text can be while still being rich.”
This deliberate ambiguity gives Piglet a sense of unpredictability, allowing readers to project their interpretations onto its fluid narrative. Hazell’s ability to balance clarity with complexity makes her debut both intellectually stimulating and emotionally resonant—a work that lingers on the page, in the mind, and perhaps most powerfully, in the gut.
Piglet is ultimately a meditation on human appetites—both literal and symbolic. It examines how we feed our hopes, starve our fears, and search for fulfillment in a world that demands curated perfection. With its unconventional approach and fearless exploration of identity through food, Piglet establishes Lottie Hazell as one of contemporary fiction’s most original and exciting new voices.
For more on Lottie Hazel, please visit her Author page in our Writer's Directory: Lottie Hazell: Redefining Modern Storytelling Through Food, Fiction & Identity.
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