A startling, deeply insightful and grotesque debut novel about meat, reproduction, and mortality. From childhood, Esther rehearses life outside her parents’ butcher shop—pushing a baby doll under her dress, waddling until it tumbles onto the asphalt in front of bewildered customers. Years later, Esther becomes a butcher herself, gifted with an uncanny ability to understand the language of meat. Yet her craft cannot satisfy the fierce longing that consumes her: the desire to reproduce. When an artificial inseminator enters her life, hope flickers—but no child comes. Under the gaze of a small-town community, Esther moves through life as if on a surreal theatre stage, her lonely room pulsating with joys and sorrows of the world. Esther’s story unfolds as a darkly comic, absurdist tale — oscillating between humor and existential melancholy, creating a tone that is at once intriguing and strangely tender. Beneath the grotesque humor lies a deep sadness: Esther’s infertility and yearning for simplicity and spirituality in a mechanized, profit-driven world of meat.