Rachel is calorie-counting, therapist-dependent and spiritually unmoored.

She lives inside all of her restrictions, she does so with food, sex, desire and any sense of self-permission. When she meets Miriam, an Orthodox Jewish woman who works at a frozen yoghurt shop, the straw breaks and she becomes totally and completely obsessive.

Broder is funny in a bleak way, erotic without glamour, self-lacerating without self-pity. The book circles body image, maternal inheritance, religion, control, and the strange holiness people project onto each other when they’re starving for something unnamed.

For readers who liked The Pisces but want it more interior or for anyone interested in desire, dieting and its complexities, love as compulsion, will find a home in this book.