In a city where nothing is killed, the only honest meal left is a man.Dr. Jonas Nilsen came to Fjellford to disappear.A psychiatrist who no longer trusts his own judgment, with a sister he hasn't called in four months and a one-way ticket he booked on purpose, he arrives in Norway's most beautiful city expecting nothing from it. Fjellford gives him everything anyway. A hotel room that learns how he takes his coffee before he orders it. A woman who teaches him her language on Tuesdays. A table of friends who set a place for him every Thursday.For eleven weeks, Jonas gets better. He sleeps. He eats. He starts to want his life back.That was the point.Fjellford's great achievement is cultured meat. No animal suffers. Nothing dies here. And in a city that has engineered slaughter out of existence, real provenance has become the rarest luxury on earth. One society still eats honestly. They have been watching Jonas since the airport. They have measured how few people would notice him gone. And they have been composing a dinner around him, course by course, week by week, since the day he landed.When the invitation comes, Jonas says yes.Now he is sealed in a stone room beneath the city with six people who genuinely love him, no phone, no passport, forty words of Norwegian, and eleven courses standing between him and the end of the meal. He can't overpower anyone. He can't run. He has twenty years of reading people, and one night left to use it.A literary psychological thriller about surveillance, appetite, and the terrible things that can be done to a person with nothing but kindness.For readers of Tender Is the Flesh and The Silent Patient, and anyone who has ever been made to feel chosen.
