Samuel Pollen’s honest account of teenage male anorexia, The Year I Didn’t Eat, will be published by ZunTold Publishing next year.
The debut will be the first novel in ZunTold’s new Fiction as Therapy division, and publication will coincide with the charity Beats Eating Disorders Week.
The Year I Didn’t Eat tells the story of fourteen year old Max, a boy suffering from anorexia, over a year of his life through diary extracts and Max’s narrative. Drawing from the author’s own experience of being a teenage boy with the disease, it’s a heart-breaking, deeply affecting and surprisingly funny book, which sheds light on a subject often swept under the table…
Christmas Day is going to be super-hard. Like, the hardest day of my life so far.
Breakfast will be OK, because it’ll just be me, Robin, Mum and Dad, and they already know what I’m like. They won’t mind when I say no to coffee, and croissants, and the juice with bits in they’ve bought specially. They won’t mind when I just eat one slice of toast with the thinnest smear of low-fat spread.
Well, they will mind. But they won’t say anything.
But then, everyone else will arrive. Auntie Jess, Uncle Rich, James, Louise and Gran. And they’ve not seen me like this.
They don’t know what I’m like now.
The novel received a starred review from Kirkus, who said: “Pollen writes from the inside about anorexia, effectively communicating the feelings, obsessions, and difficulties Max experiences and making it clear that it is an equal-opportunity disorder… Readers will appreciate the raw and real portrayal of anorexia from a group often left out of the conversation.”
Founder and md of ZunTold, Elaine Bousfield, is thrilled at the acquisition: “I’m absolutely delighted to be publishing The Year I Didn’t Eat this spring. Sam is a brilliant writer and is really bringing something new and vital to the YA market.”
The news was announced in The Bookseller yesterday.
