Already an international sensation, this darkly funny and provocatively visceral novel introduces one of contemporary fiction's most unforgettable heroines: a gifted butcher whose greatest longing is to become a mother.

To Esther, meat is beautiful. It is how she understands the world. Raised in a small industrial town built around a sprawling meat factory, she grows up in her parents’ butcher shop. As a child, she loved plunging her hand into freshly ground meat and imagining her own body as flesh that someone might one day touch as tenderly. As an adult, her life falls perfectly into place: she lands her dream job at the Factory, then marries an artificial inseminator at the town’s pig farm. Only one thing is missing: a child.

Esther longs deeply for the time when she will create flesh from her own flesh, but try as the couple do, she does not fall pregnant. As the years pass, her parents worry, her neighbours gossip, and her coworkers stare openly at her unswelling belly. But Esther’s body has plans of its own.

Deadpan, provocative, and unexpectedly humane, this is a singular literary debut exploring appetite, flesh, fertility, and the extraordinary ways our bodies shape our understanding of love, loss, and creation. With its fiercely original heroine and masterfully surreal vision, Esther, the Butcher introduces Mariia Niskavaara as a striking new voice in international literary fiction.