Someone You Can Build a Nest In

Shesheshen is a shapeshifting monster who lives in the ruins under a hill, sleeps through winters, eats the occasional monster hunter, and builds her body out of whatever bones and organs are to hand, so she goes about with a stolen ribcage and someone else's teeth. She is not evil. She simply has a digestive system and no manners.

Hunters come for her, she is badly wounded escaping, and she is nursed back to health by Homily, a large, gentle, catastrophically people pleasing human woman who does not realise what she is caring for. Shesheshen falls in love, and being a monster her instinct is to express it by laying eggs inside the beloved so that her young can eat their way out later, which she regards as extremely romantic.

The complication is that Homily's family are the ones hunting her, and they are worse. Homily's family, headed by its matriarch, destroys the children it claims to love, and the novel's real subject is the difference between a predator and an abuser: one eats you and one convinces you that you deserved it.

The comedy is genuinely funny and the violence is wet and frequent, often on the same page.

Shesheshen's narration carries it. She is baffled by human customs, takes everything literally, and reasons about affection with the same practical calm she applies to reassembling a spine, which is where most of the comedy comes from.

Around three hundred and twenty pages, fast and driven entirely by voice, with a plot that keeps its shape while the tone swings from farce to genuine cruelty.

Best for readers who want a monster romance that means the monster half, and one of the sharpest recent books about leaving a family that insists it loves you.