Avery Venn

Avery Venn writes novels about appetite: what we want, what we take, and what we go without.

A financier who has spent twenty-five years eating people. A woman found dead in a Wapping penthouse with no name, no phone and no bag. An architect who is thirty-eight, and tired. An anaesthetist, a model, a lawyer and a world champion who will never quite meet. A young woman who notices everything.

The novels are built from overlapping lives. Several people move through the same city, the same night or the same year, close enough to touch, and the story lives where they cross: the room they are all in when something happens, the thing one of them knows and the others don't.

The prose is dry, exact and, where it can be, funny. The endings do not tie up every thread. The covers are paintings by Goya, Sargent and Hammershøi, and a panel of nineteenth-century wallpaper from Alsace, because the books are, in their way, about looking closely at people who don't know they are being looked at.

All of the books are published in paperback on Amazon.