Appetite: A Novel - Softcover

Paramita, P.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0593978587 ISBN 13: 9780593978580

Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback, 2026

Synopsis

An affirming and utterly original debut about a young chef chasing her dreams—and the pro wrestler she idolizes who derails everything

“Appetite holds a mirror to the puzzling ways humans sometimes find themselves connecting with one another, on and offline. Prepare to be captivated.”—Jinwoo Chong, author of I Leave It Up to You

“I flew through Appetite in one hungry sitting—chest racing, mouth watering, and seriously questioning if I should make women’s wrestling my new personality.”—Haley Jakobson, author of Old Enough

How far will you go to feed your ambitions?

Zarina, a prep cook at a fancy New Haven restaurant, is underpaid, overworked, and might as well be invisible. The only upside? She gets to take home leftover ingredients and whip up modern spins on the Bangladeshi dishes she grew up eating—all while enjoying her second greatest passion, professional wrestling: namely, her hero Sierra Myst, the massively successful, high-flying heel who’s built like a superhero and is every bit as daring.

One night, Zarina posts about Sierra Myst, and the impossible happens: Sierra responds. Zarina is elated at the chance to become closer with her idol. At first, their friendship is everything she’s ever dreamed of. But as the weeks fly by, Zarina starts to feel more like Sierra’s unpaid personal assistant and relationship counselor—and her desire to make Sierra happy soon threatens everything she’s worked for.

About this title

About the Author

P. Paramita is a Bangladesh-born, New Haven-based writer, professor, and pop culture enthusiast. Paramita’s work has appeared in Teen Vogue, them, Color Bloq, Autostraddle, Southampton Review, and Dogwood Journal, where she was a finalist for the Dogwood Literary Award in Nonfiction.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1

The night Sierra follows me on Twitter, I have my fingers trenched deep inside potatoes.

My workplace, Zero's, had received a fresh batch of Yukon golds, the preferred kind for the signature garlic-roasted potatoes appetizer. After I'd finished my clean-up duties and most of the staff had gone home, I'd been ecstatic to find the remains of last week's russets that Callum, our grill chef, had saved for me in storage. Potatoes mean one thing: aloo bhorta for dinner. Aloo bhorta is an exhaustive multistep ordeal, and I don't always have the energy to boil potatoes at home after hours on my feet slicing cucumbers into exact six-and-a-half-inch spears. But tonight, in a Christmas Eve miracle, my shift ended an hour early.

My roommate Erica took the train to her parents' house in Middletown this morning, so there's no one to see my face turn red as I try to avoid the splatter of boiling water when pouring the russets into the pot. As I work, I replay my hand brushing against Anna's as we both reached for our punch cards nestled near each other on the metal rack against the wall at work. Anna—yes, the Anna Callahan whose pastries I have been admiring in magazines and food blogs over the last few years—laughed and let me clock out first after I'd thanked Callum for saving me the potatoes. As I was turning to leave and let the two of them chat, she hugged me goodbye and wished me merry Christmas. I almost said that I don't celebrate, but luckily my mouth refused to move and I just gave her a silent nod. I try not to fangirl too much in front of Anna. I want her to think of me as a cool co-worker, not an obsessive fan. I overheard her talking to Callum, someone who never seems starstruck in her presence, about her plans to drive up to her mom's house after tonight's shift. As I'm reaching on my tiptoes to grab a bottle of mustard oil from the cabinet, Anna is probably taking the interstate north, her passenger seat carrying candied ginger scones made especially for her mom.

It doesn't mean anything for me to spend tomorrow alone. My parents aren't in the United States, and even if they were, we wouldn't celebrate Christmas. New Haven is far enough from Manhattan's overbearing Rockefeller tree that I don't think about the family time I'm missing out on. New Haven tries to make a show of being inclusive with a Christmas tree, plastic menorah, and lighted Kwanzaa sign struggling to stay standing amid the snow on the Green. By the time we're all back at Zero's on December 26, the city will have packed away the decorations, and it will be business as usual.

I try not to think about work or other people's families as I wash basmati rice. I pack a couple cups with the long grains and dump them into the fifteen-dollar Black+Decker rice cooker I bought myself when I graduated from college. My mother would have considered it a lackluster gift.

As a child, I never craved aloo bhorta. It was a food for upset tummies, something my mother would mix up with rice to hand-feed tiny me when I'd thrown up my first round of dinner. Then she'd rub her hand in circles against my spine to spur on good health.

A lot has changed since then. Now I'm taller (at five-five, tall for a Bangladeshi, average for the US). I have shorter hair, a bob, because I want to (although it's still black). I have two tattoos and a nose piercing. (My family had my ears pierced when I was five. Luckily piercings are cultural markers, and my mother never yelled about those holes like she did when I got an undercut my sophomore year.) I don't wear makeup, although I've found myself highlighter-curious. (Male wrestlers wear it to catch the light on their chiseled cheekbones, so I think my Sephora-brand highlighter stick counts as androgynous.)

The biggest change is not being able to call my mom and tell her about my life. Any mention of food sends us into a fight over how I'm wasting my life when I should be in medical school. I didn't have any opportunities to cook until college, and I wish I'd paid more attention to everything I was eating when I was growing up in Dhaka so I could go beyond taste memory. I want muscle memory, the physical remembrance of which exact aromatics I should add and when and how much.

The secret to a good aloo bhorta is the marriage of five ingredients: potatoes, mustard oil, ghee, chilis, and red onions. I've eaten it for years, but I've only recently perfected the recipe by watching a twenty-one-year-old on TikTok. This guy, sporting a traditional red-and-black gamcha, with the most English-toned Bangla accent, is educating me on the Bengali green chili, kacha morich, which he calls by the name American grocery stores use: the Thai chili pepper. Learning from the video feels like being in the remedial class, but it's the best recipe I've found. Glad the diaspora kids are doing well, though, and spreading the good word of Bangladeshi food.

I quarter a medium red onion and cut it into super-thin slices, then pour shorsher tel, or mustard oil—another creation I thank my ancestors for—into a frying pan and wait for it to heat up. When it's ready, I toss in the onions alongside some dried red chilis. I try to be patient about not touching the potatoes while they cool, but I can't wait to start mashing them. I poke a finger in and let the rounded edge crumble at my touch. Bengalis do not use a masher. When I first came to the US and saw that people used a masher instead of their hands, I wondered if that was why the Bangladeshi version tasted better to me. I concluded that mashed potatoes can reach optimum deliciousness only if the love is transferred directly from the chef's hands.

The steam from one of the russets burns the edge of my index finger as I knead them. I'm momentarily distracted from the sting by my speakers, as Spotify transitions from MUNA to a very targeted ad: "Will the rivalry between former best friends Sierra Myst and Spike Girl continue to cause destruction? Will Johnny Tango finally explain why he threw Bulldog Bobby into a dumpster? All this and more on Friday Night Wrestle Thunder Ground live at eight, seven Central."

Wrestle Thunder Ground, or WTG for short, is usually a live broadcast, but this episode was shot last week so the wrestlers could spend the holiday with their families. Last time I checked, my favorite character, Sierra Myst, was spending the night with her siblings, endless pictures of her sister's corgi flooding her Instagram stories. Photo evidence of other people's families, their pets, their togetherness, leaves a low ache in my belly, but I concentrate on working the potatoes into a soft fluff. I bring over the pan of red onions and dried chilies fried in mustard oil, pour it over the mashed potatoes, and combine with my hands. Licking a bit off my index finger, I decide it needs more mustard oil and salt.

I chop green chilis and throw them in. Then I pour in the ghee, lots and lots of it. There can never be enough ghee. I taste again. This time the balance of flavors is right—hearty, with a punch from the shorsher tel—and it's perfect timing, as an alarm sounds on my phone to remind me that it's time for Wrestle Thunder Ground. I bring my laptop to the kitchen and balance it on the pile of unused cookbooks I always find an excuse to buy but am too intimidated to ever open. Anna Callahan's book Last but Not Yeast is in this stack. I select the pirated stream in my bookmarks folder to see the opening segment featuring two beefy male wrestlers trading insults. They slap each other until one of them agrees to wrestle the other at the next pay-per-view special. The men bore me with their recycled storylines from the early 2000s the writers think we're too young to remember, but I've always loved watching the women wrestle.

When they started getting more screentime in my teen years, the women captivated me with the way they talked to one another, stating what they wanted and how they felt without seeming to worry how their declarations would be received—the opposite of how life was in my family. The storylines were easy to follow: good guys or babyfaces overcoming their fearsome rivals, the bad guys, who we call the heels. A "buried alive" match finally made me realize the fighting is scripted; the wrestler who "died" in the contest eventually returned to life three months later. It could have made me turn away from wrestling, but knowing someone was crafting these stories for me made me fall even deeper in love. Creating a successful wrestling match is very much like creating the perfect dish. Finding the right rivalry, the perfect storyline, getting audience attention by trial and error of mixing up different wrestlers in the ring reminds me of picking out the right ingredients, getting the perfect flavor combination, and tasting the marriage of a mixture of perfectly calibrated flavors.

Edition details

• Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperback
• Publication date: 2026
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0593978587
• ISBN 13: 9780593978580
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 272