GUTS

"My dad called to tell me he was moving to Germany to marry a woman he met on FarmVille. 'Good,' I said, and hung up." When Stella's father announces he's leaving the country for a stranger he met online, she thinks he's finally become someone else's problem. Then her grandmother asks for just one last thing before she dies: that Stella reunites with him. For seven years Stella has lived with the imagined version of her father, but as she's pulled reluctantly back into his orbit, she finds herself untangling which parts of her life she chose and which parts were handed down. Between shifts on the fish & meat counter, where food is how she makes sense of the world, a string of destructive relationships, and nights in London that blur into mornings, she keeps circling the same question: whether the first love we know becomes the cycle we keep repeating. Sharp, darkly funny and full of appetite, GUTS is a fearless debut from a dazzling new literary voice. A novel about inheritance in all its forms: the families we come from, the stories we tell ourselves, the people we love despite knowing better, and what it takes to imagine a different ending. © Amy Ashton 2027 (P) Penguin Audio 2027