Eat the Ones You Love

A twisted, tangled story about workplace love-affairs, and plants with a taste for human flesh from the acclaimed author of Spare and Found Parts and Other Words for Smoke.

During a visit to her local shopping mall, Shell Pine sees a ‘HELP NEEDED’ sign in a flower shop window. She’s just left her fiance´, lost her job, and moved home to her parents’ house. She has to bring some good into her life, so she takes a chance. And flowers are just the good thing she’s been looking for, as is Neve, the beautiful florist. The thing is, Neve needs help more than Shell could possibly imagine.

An orchid growing in the heart of the mall is watching them closely. The beautiful florist belongs to him, and he’ll do just about anything to make sure he can keep growing big and strong. Nothing he eats— nobody he eats—can satisfy him, except the thing he most desires. Neve. He will stop at nothing to eat the one he loves.

Infused with wit, heart and horror, this is a story about possession, monstrosity and working in retail. It is about hunger and desire, and other terrible things that grow.

Review

Praise for Eat the Ones You Love:

A book that dwells in the real and unreal, that has weirdness and darkness but humour and heart too. It's weird, yes - how could a book about a talking plant not be - but so at home in its weirdness that the world seems more magical when you put the book down.
-Sunday Times

Gorgeously written and incredibly atmospheric, this very Irish horror story is a brilliant exploration of desire, fear and belonging.
-Irish Times

Deliciously strange, delightfully wicked... Griffin thrives in the liminal space between genres, throwing out roots and blooming in weird and wonderful ways.
-V.E. Schwab

It's been an excellent few years for gothic novels, and Eat the Ones You Love is among the best I've read. It's certainly the most fun. Gorgeous, bewitching, full of heart and secrets and smarts, it kept me up late and turned my dreams strange.
-Kelly Link, bestselling author of The Book of Love

This murdery plant is my number one problematic fave. Eat The Ones You Love is intricate, unusual, and unlike anything you've read before. An eccentric, deeply sensual, and artistically sure-footed exploration of toxicity in many forms. I devoured it.
-Olivie Blake, New York Times bestselling author of The Atlas Six

Sarah Maria Griffin is an artist of the rarest kind: genuine, vulnerable, funny, tragic and wise.
-Sarah Rees Brennan, New York Times bestselling author of Long Live Evil

Eat The Ones You Love is a masterpiece inventive, intimate, and so incisive on the way class shapes human relationships. Griffin's voice is absolutely singular; scalpel-sharp and deeply lyrical, every word unexpected and yet precise. Simply put, this book redefines the literary horror genre. Fans of Paul Tremblay and T. Kingfisher have found their new obsession.
-Laura Steven, award-winning author of The Society of Soulless Girls

About the Author

Sarah Maria Griffin's first novel, Spare and Found Parts, was published by Titan Books in Spring 2018 and was shortlisted for the Irish Book Awards that year. Her second, Other Words For Smoke, arrived in April 2019. Her collection of essays about emigration, Not Lost, was published by New Island Press in 2013. Her nonfiction has appeared in Winter Papers, Guts, The Stinging Fly and The Irish Times and more recently, in a weekly series about the internet for The Gloss Magazine. She was the recipient of an Arts Council Bursary for Literature in 2017 and 2018, and is a winner of the European Science Fiction Chrysalis Award. She was the Writer in Residence in Maynooth University in 2017/18, the DLR Writer In Residence in 2018/19.