Love Bytes at Piatkus

The Adultery Diet by Eva Cassady

We couldn't resist giving you a glimpse at a wonderfully fun novel we're publishing this month.

The Adultery Diet is a witty satirical look at our weight-obsessed culture and features a poor down-trodden heroine who finds herself completely unmotivated in her desire to lose weight until an old flame makes contact....

Enjoy...

P.S. To read more log on to lovereading. (You'll have to register but they have the next chapter too...)






'Everybody asks how I did it. Women gather around me at parties, stop me in the halls at work, their eyes measuring my new body, their smiles tight with the long history of their failures. Tell me, their eyes plead. Every one of them has a shelfful of diet books at home: low-carb, no-carb, Weight Watchers and Zone, South Beach, Dial-a-Meal, and hamster diets of lettuce and seeds. They’ve done Marnie and Jane and Beto, yoga and hip-hop, Tae Bo, Buns of Steel, and the Ab Lounge. They’ve hired personal trainers, had their stomachs stapled or their lipo sucked. Now they’re angry and ashamed. They feel like failures. But even more, they feel betrayed—all the books and commercials have lied to them. And let’s face it, they have lied to themselves. They come to me for the truth.

"There’s no secret,” I tell them. “Just diet and exercise.”

But that’s a lie, too. Every diet has a secret: vanity, wounded pride, rage. Or desire.

“You have to want it,” I say, and they nod.

But the world is full of its. You need something stronger than crème brûlée, more seductive than chocolate, more powerful than hunger itself. And in the end, you learn that the it doesn’t matter. It’s the wanting that gets you to the gym in the morning, propels you past the bakery on your way to work, carries you back to the gym in the evening for the unforgiving cardio with the Lycraclad gazelles from Ford and Elite. You have to hunger, not starve. You have to be driven to walk those twentyfour blocks to work, then turn left towards the stairs instead of joining the crowd at the elevators. Something has to be eating at you.

“Eva looks great,” the men say to my husband, and I see him smile. What man doesn’t want to be envied?

What man doesn’t want to get his wife back at forty-four, finding—to his surprise—a younger woman emerging from under the weight of the years like a flower growing from a snowbank? They don’t say it aloud, but their eyes say, How did she do it? Can she teach my wife? Sure, boys. But be careful what you wish for.'


From The Adultery Diet by Eva Cassady

Labels: Adultery, Diet, Novel

posted by Gillian @ 4:52 pm