The Thick and the Lean

Written by Chana Porter

Narrated by Kamali Minter, Suehyla El-Attar Young and Deepti Gupta

In Lambda Award finalist Chana Porter’s “decadent and richly imagined” (Alexandra Kleeman, author of You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine) novel, an aspiring chef, a cyberthief, and a kitchen maid each break free of a society that wants to constrain them.

In the quaint religious town of Seagate, abstaining from food brings one closer to God.

But Beatirc Bolano is hungry. She craves the forbidden: butter, flambé, marzipan. As Seagate takes increasingly extreme measures to regulate every calorie its citizens consume, Beatrice must make a choice: give up her passion for cooking or leave the only community she has known.

Elsewhere, Reiko Rimando has left her modest roots for a college tech scholarship in the big city. A flawless student, she is set up for success…until her school pulls her funding, leaving her to face either a mountain of debt or a humiliating return home. But Reiko is done being at the mercy of the system. She forges a third path—outside the law.

With the guidance of a mysterious cookbook written by a kitchen maid centuries ago, Beatrice and Reiko each grasp for a life of freedom—something more easily imagined than achieved in a world dominated by catastrophic corporate greed.

A startling fable of the entwined perils of capitalism, body politics, and the stigmas women face for appetites of every kind, Chana Porter’s profound new novel explores the reclamation of pleasure as a revolutionary act.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster Audio
• Release date: Apr 18, 2023
• ISBN: 9781797151946

Chana Porter

Heralded as “the new Philip K. Dick,” Chana Porter is an author, playwright, teacher, MacDowell fellow, and cofounder of The Octavia Project, a STEM and writing program for girls, trans, and nonbinary youth that uses speculative fiction to envision greater possibilities for our world. She lives in Los Angeles, California, and is also the author of The Seep, a finalist for the Lambda Literary Award. Her newest novel, The Thick and the Lean, was named Best Science Fiction of 2023 by The Times (London). 

Reviews for The Thick and the Lean

[Tracey Payne · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I really enjoyed this. Looking forward to more from this author!

[Janneke van den Brand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The story never really goes anywhere, the characters are a bit muddy, but it was entertaining enough.