THE DEATH AND LIFE OF AUGUST SWEENEY: a novel
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 The Handmaid’s Tale (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: How the 20th Century Learned to Act
"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 Star-Touched Queen and The Last Tale of the Flower Bride
“A masterful debut.”
—Weike Wang, PEN/Hemingway-award winning author of Chemistry and Rental House
Hyman Bloom, The Anatomist (1953)
On the night he dies, August Sweeney is just pulling himself out of the weeds in the restaurant that was supposed to be his comeback. An immense man of immense appetites, August worked his way up from the bowels of a greasy spoon in Queens to international culinary stardom, and his fall, when it came, left a crater you could see from space. When Dr. Maya Zhu, a guarded, intense autopsist, is summoned to investigate, she discovers she must operate under strict conditions Sweeney himself dictated before he died. Over the course of a single day, Zhu's fate becomes forever tied to Sweeney's, and her life, and his death, will change in ways she never imagined. For August Sweeney isn't about to let a little thing like death stop him from raising hell.
This is a novel of fame, food, and forensics: The Bear meets Bones. It's a book to make you hungry and ease your fear of death. 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 admin@sfwp.com
SHORT FICTION
“The Hijacking of Eastern 7,” Barrelhouse, 2017
