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A novel of staggering vision and tremendous heart. On full display here are Hunter’s nonpareil technique, her skillful excavation of her characters’ interior landscapes — a digging done both ruthlessly and yet with abundant mercy — and her inspired inventiveness at the level of language . . . All of which is to say that Eat Only When You’re Hungry is in every way majestic: stunningly detailed, formidably written, and profoundly affecting.
— Vincent Scarpa, Los Angeles Review of Books
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Hunter delves closely into Greg's world as he travels from West Virginia to Florida in a rented RV, and also delves into the troubled lives of his family members, with an honesty that is both harsh and tender. Eat Only When You're Hungry does many things—it's a painfully vivid family portrait, a road novel, and a novel about addiction in its many forms—and it does them all wonderfully, with a stunning emotional impact.
— Isaac Fitzgerald, Buzzfeed
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There’s a vibrant ruthlessness at the heart of Lindsay Hunter’s second novel, Eat Only When You’re Hungry, the kind that makes it hard, at times, to catch your breath . . . What are we to do with all this love and longing, imperfect and incomplete though it may be? Eat Only When You’re Hungry eschews easy answers, or resolution in any fundamental way
— David Ulin, 4Columns
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Hunter specializes in spotlighting characters at their low point. . . . In a book about binge eating, Hunter is always feeding the reader more metaphors, sometimes handfuls per page. What might feel gratuitous from a lesser writer is a signature success for Hunter; she serves up images that are at once salty and sweet, satisfyingly tragicomic. . . . Ultimately, Eat Only When You’re Hungry is an extraordinary trip of a novel not because of its scene-setting but the quality of its characters.
— Ben Purkert, Fiction Advocate
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Hunter has a gift for dark fiction, rendered with a tender and generous touch . . . In Hunter’s smart twist on the classic American road trip, the novel becomes an instant-gratification junk-food tour through the national underbelly.
— National Book Review (Five Hot Books This Week)
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[A] commanding narrative . . . A savage tale of parenthood and squandered hope from an author whose unsparing eye never ceases to subvert the mundane.
— Kirkus
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Hunter's absurd Floridian landscapes and darkly tender moments are keen and hilarious, exposing the complexities of addiction and an overweight man with a weak heart but unfailing love.
— Booklist
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This novel takes us on a road trip with an American Everyman into the heart of American hunger—for freedom, for connection, for junk food, for love. Hunter has a brilliant sense for the perfectly telling image, and her humor is so biting and smart it was almost a surprise, at the end of this engrossing book, to realize how thoroughly she had broken my heart.
— Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You
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Compassionate, claustrophobic, gut-wrenchingly observed, Eat Only When You’re Hungry probes the fine lines between hunger and addiction, addiction and desire. In perfectly nuanced prose, Lindsay Hunter observes the human ability to go on in the face of the unexpected, the unknown, the regretted, and, perhaps most important, the mundane.
— Lori Ostlund, author of After the Parade