Williams' debut about women and food to Hamish Hamilton

Hamish Hamilton has acquired a debut novel by Lara Williams about women and food entitled Supper Club.

Hermione Thompson, assistant editor at Hamish Hamilton, bought world rights to the title in a pre-empt from Becky Thomas at Johnson & Alcock, to publish in Spring 2019.

Supper Club follows a secret society of women who refuse to suppress their appetites any longer, holding wild, all-night feasts to reclaim their hunger and their bodies. And at the centre of the Supper Club is Roberta – cynical yet anxious, precocious and lost – seeking the answer to a simple question. If you feed a starving woman, what will she grow into?

Thompson said she "could not be more proud" to be publishing "this essential coming-of-age story for our times."

"Lara writes about young womanhood as the real women I know have actually experienced it", said Thompson. "Supper Club is absolutely a novel about food: its rich, visceral physicality and its complex psychological resonances. But it is also about the many other kinds of appetite that our society denies, the many ways we are told not to take up space. And above all it is about the intense friendships of youth, which can flare up and fade away so quickly, leaving us changed forever. Lara’s writing is devastatingly perceptive and savagely funny; I could not be more proud to publish this essential coming-of-age story for our times."

Williams added: "It is beyond a dream to be signed with Hamish Hamilton. I absolutely love Hermione's ideas for the novel, and can't wait to work with her and see it take shape."

Williams is the author of a short story collection, Treats (Freight Books) which was shortlisted for the Republic of Consciousness Prize, the Edinburgh First Book Award, the Saboteur Awards and longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize. One of her short stories appeared in the Best British Short Stories 2017 collection. She has written for the Guardian, the New Scientist, the Times Literary Supplement, the Debrief, Vice, Grazia and SomeSuch Stories, among others.