The Death and Life of August Sweeney
A novel
Coming March 2025 from SFWP
Early Praise
“Ashworth has a talent for creating characters so detailed and aIive that they are practically three-dimensional. Flawless.”
--Rion Amilcar Scott, PEN/Bingham-award-winning author of THE WORLD DOESN’T REQUIRE YOU
“Hilarious, accurate, and all too familiar.”
—Bradley Whitford, star of THE WEST WING (and passer of 27 kidney stones)
In carving out a fictional space within the celebrity chef world for August Sweeney, Sam Ashworth charts decades of our culture’s shifting relationship to food with deft humor and memorable characters. This is the most fun I’ve had reading about an autopsy since Mary Roach’s STIFF.
— Isaac Butler, author of the National Books Critics Circle Award-winning THE METHOD
"Visceral in every sense of the word. In Ashworth's assured and exacting prose, what could so easily be disturbing becomes decadent. Divine, even. A triumph."
—Roshani Chokshi, NYT-bestselling author of THE LAST TALE OF THE FLOWER BRIDE
“A masterful debut.”
—Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway-award winning author of CHEMISTRY
Hyman Bloom, The Anatomist (1953)
When legendary chef August Sweeney drops dead in his restaurant one night, Dr. Maya Zhu, a guarded, intense autopsist, is summoned to investigate why. When Maya discovers that Sweeney mysteriously hand-picked her for the job, things begin to spin out of her control. As she digs deeper into his immense body, she discovers that a little thing like death isn’t about to stop August Sweeney from raising hell.
Longlisted for the Dzanc Prize in Fiction, The Death and Life of August Sweeney is a true book of the body. It combines the morbid humor of Raven Leilani's Luster with the anatomical precision of Ian McEwan's Saturday. To write it, I spent years researching clinical pathology and fine dining alike, spending weeks observing autopsies and even working as a stagiaire in a Michelin-starred kitchen.
For advance review copies, contact Andrew Gifford at andrew.gifford@gmail.com
SHORT FICTION
“The Hijacking of Eastern 7,” Barrelhouse, 2017