Atlantic acquires Jessica Hamel-Akré's book about appetite, desire and rationality after four-way auction

Atlantic has acquired Jessica Hamel-Akré’s The Art of Not Eating, a book about appetite, desire and rationality.

Senior editor James Pulford bought UK and Commonwealth rights, excluding Canada but including e-book, audio and serial,from Kate Evans at Peters Fraser + Dunlop, in a competitive four-way auction. The book will be published on 22nd August 2024 as a royal hardback, trade paperback and e-book.

The author is a historian of ideas, literature and medicine, and a social sciences consultant. The book goes through the pages of medical studies, novels and historical scandals, "meeting ash-eating mystics, wasting society girls, impoverished female fasters and early feminist philosophers, all of whom were once grappling with nascent ideas around food, longing and the body", the publisher said. "In doing so, [Hamel-Akré] uncovers the 18th-Century origins of both today’s diet culture and her own troubled relationship with wanting."

Pulford said: "I was completely mesmerised by Jessica’s high-wire investigation into the origins of society’s troubled relationships with food, appetite and the body. The Art of Not Eating is a bold and beautifully told journey through the past that reveals how men such as George Cheyne medicalised female rationality and desire in the 18th Century, and how these disturbing and oppressive ideas are still at work today. I can’t wait to publish this brilliant book."

Hamel-Akré added: "I hope this book, through its immersive form and content, will offer fresh perspectives for how we think, speak and feel about diet culture and body image by inviting readers to reflect in unique ways on the inescapable pressure these standards put not only on our physical bodies, but on our many interactions with those we love and with ourselves. Ultimately, is it a work of reconciliation with the self."