Shalom Auslander’s last novel, Hope: A Tragedy, featured a “foul-mouthed and geriatric Anne Frank” among its characters, said Sam Leith in The Guardian. In his latest work, he again risks offending readers with a satire about cannibals being a “persecuted minority”. Seventh Seltzer is a New York publisher who belongs to a dwindling band of “Cannibal-Americans”. Having “married out” of his tribe, he no longer participates in family rituals. Yet when his mother summons him to her deathbed, hoping he’ll give her the traditional send-off – for which she has been fattening herself up – his cannibalistic instincts reassert themselves.
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