Tender Is the Flesh

After a virus makes all animal meat lethal to humans, the world faces a choice: go without, or find another source. Under pressure from an industry unwilling to die, governments legalize what everyone calls "the Transition" — the breeding, slaughter, and sale of human beings for food. The victims are stripped of language and legal personhood, referred to only as "heads," their flesh marketed as "special meat."

Marcos Tejo works at a processing plant, moving product and managing suppliers with a numbness that lets him survive a job he cannot bear to look at directly. Grieving the death of his infant son and estranged from his wife, he holds the horror at arm's length — until a supplier gifts him a live female specimen, and keeping her forces him to confront the humanity the whole system depends on denying.

Agustina Bazterrica's spare, unflinching dystopia is a work of literary horror that uses institutionalized cannibalism as a mirror for industrial farming, capitalism, and the everyday machinery of dehumanization. It builds to an ending readers rarely forget.