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Hello and welcome to the Spectators Book Club podcast. I'm Sam Leith, the literary editor of The Spectator.

And this week I'm joined by Shalom Alslander, who I think is one of the funniest novelists writing today.

His new book is called Mother for Dinner.

It's the second novel. He's also the author of the memoir, Forskins Lament, and the novel Hope a Tragedy.

Shalom, welcome.

Can I ask you to start by just explaining the basic premise of Mother for Dinner,

because I think you'll probably do it better than I would.

Yeah, so Mother for Dinner is about a young man, his name is Seventh Seltzer,

and he comes from a line of cannibal Americans.

He's one of the last families. There was once a thriving Brooklyn community of cannibal Americans. He's one of the last families. There was once a thriving Brooklyn

community of cannibal Americans. I should say, by the way, that's not true. People ask me,

people are asking me, is that actually, is that in Bensonhurst? I guess it's somehow because it's

Brooklyn, it's believable. But in the world of this fiction, he's the last

cannibal American family. He has 12 brothers, one sister, and a extremely domineering hateful mother,

who at the beginning of the novel, calls him and all his family together, tells them that

she's dying, and her last words before she croaks are

Eat Me. Now I should add that she's about 500 pounds, 6'4 4 and not only have all the children,

for the most part, I might say I think it's 9 out of 12, mostly assimilated and ditched their cultural heritage, but not a single

one of them knows the rules anymore. Even if they wanted to eat her, nobody knows how to cook her,

nobody knows what to do with the rest of her. And the only one they can reach out to in this time of

need is their pre-sienile dementia uncle who was once sort of the leader of

...