Tender Is The Flesh is bleak, dark, and difficult. Bazterrica wants to show you this new world without color correction. There’s no sugar coating, no watered-down sentences to coddle the reader. Bazterrica and translator Sarah Moses bring these stark realities to the page with powerful prose. Enter this book knowing you’ll endure gut-wrenching descriptions of torture and detached passages detailing the processes by which plants prepare human meat for human consumption. Tender Is The Flesh won’t hold your hand. Throughout the novel, Marcos starts to reckon with his new reality in ways he hasn’t dreamed of until now. Despite the laws declaring human-esque contact with the specimen a capital offense, Marcos begins to treat her with more respect.

One day, a colleague gifts Marcus a high-grade human specimen. After the death of their son, his wife left, and his dad slips into worsening dementia. Marcos works in a plant that prepares human meat for consumption. In response, governments instituted the “Transition,” a vague term for a terrible change: the legalization and commoditization of cannibalism.

A virus devastated the world’s animal population, making meat toxically inedible for humans. Marcos’ world looks a lot like ours, with one glaring difference. It also tore me apart from the inside out with its brutally visceral imagery and themes. I arrived at my decision to read Tender Is The Flesh knowing I had a flight coming up I thought the 200-pager would be a nice bite-sized mid-air read, and it lived up to those expectations. Agustina Bazterrica’s Tender Is The Flesh came to my bookshelves by way of my sister, who insisted I read it and subsequently bought it for me in an effort to make that insistence a reality.

Tender is the flesh marcos