Piglet by Lottie Hazell
- Dec 15, 2024
- 4 min read
Updated: Sep 22, 2025
Piglet by Lottie Hazell is a sharp contemporary debut about appetite, class, and a wedding thrown off course when a fiancé’s confession arrives two weeks before the ceremony, set between Oxford and London and told through precise food writing that doubles as a character study. Published in the United States by Henry Holt on February 27, 2024, the novel earned praise from the New York Times Book Review and appeared on must-read lists, drawing notice for its dark wit and its portrait of hunger as both bodily and social drive
Food, Desire, and Identity: Lottie Hazell’s Debut Novel Piglet
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 narrative tools, symbolic markers, and emotional triggers that drive her protagonist’s search for meaning and identity than sustenance.
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.
About Piglet
Lottie Hazell’s first novel follows Pippa, known to everyone as Piglet, whose carefully curated life begins to fray after her partner Kit admits to a betrayal just before their wedding. The book tracks the fallout across kitchens and dinner tables, where menus, hosting, and taste become measures of status and control. Hazell uses the language of cooking to map desire, shame, and class ambition, placing bingeing, restraint, and performance in the same frame. Critics highlighted the novel’s blend of bite and elegance and its clear view of the pressures that shape young professionals in moneyed circles.
Piglet arrived with strong trade support in the United States and the United Kingdom, including Holt in the US and Transworld in the UK, with paperback programs scheduled after the initial hardcover release. Early roundups named it a notable February pick and reviewers singled out its treatment of secrecy, appetite, and the costs of a life lived for appearances.
About Lottie Hazell
Lottie Hazell is a writer and game designer from Warwickshire with a PhD in Creative Writing from Loughborough University, where she researched food writing in contemporary fiction. That scholarship shapes the appetite, class, and domestic detail that run through her debut novel Piglet, published in early 2024 by Doubleday in the United Kingdom and Henry Holt in the United States. Her work joins close observation with a playful, design-minded sense of structure, reflecting a creative practice that spans fiction and board games.
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