Excerpt from Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Excerpt
Eat the Ones You Love

Only in a time-locked building like the Woodbine Crown Mall would you see a HELP NEEDED sign in a shop window.

Not HELP WANTED.

Needed.

It was handwritten on the back of a piece of what looked to be torn wrapping paper and taped to the glass, at an odd angle. Shell stood outside the florist, her groceries and gravity tugging red crevices in the palms of her hands. Well. Her mother's groceries. Not what she'd choose for dinner, but it wasn't Shell's kitchen, or Shell's table.

HELP NEEDED.

Shell's own voice inside her head had been so loud lately. We all need help. She imagined that whoever it was running a dank little flower shop in the Woodbine Crown probably needed a fair amount of help. Maybe not more than her, necessarily. But more than most.

The mall was almost exactly as it had been since Shell was a child, or before, even. Three wings, and the great glass terrarium in the atrium, murked with moss and condensation. This would have been a gorgeous feature if it hadn't been there for thirty years and never seen a lick of window cleaner. A three-pointed crown with a strange old emerald at the centre, it was a late 1970s relic, an aspiration towards American luxury retail ambience transplanted deep in the veins of the Northside Dublin suburbs. An architectural curiosity. Three floors. The local Dunnes Stores, a library, and a radio station. An enormous fountain in the centremost wing that had been gathering copper-wish pennies to no apparent cause. No functioning elevator. A kip, Shell thought. A weird kip in a nest of housing estates. A heaving, dilapidated heart at the middle of a wire grid of old veins. The terrarium, the sick heart within the sick heart. Sick hearts all the way down.

Not a single part of it had ever been knocked and rebuilt in Shell's lifetime. No new lights installed. The linoleum tiles on the floor, mostly a dappled beige, except those that had failed under endless footfall, which were replaced at random with incongruous glitchlike patches of red or black. The ceiling was low, but in such a way that a person would hardly notice until they perhaps had been inside for an hour and were met with the strange sensation that they were miles away from daylight. The unit layout was, seemingly, unplanned. It all made Shell feel a bit sick, generally, some low nausea that could have been repulsion at poor design instilled in her at art college, or the unshakable awareness that she was, well, back home. Back here. She'd never had any intention of being anywhere of the sort. She didn't know whether she hated it truly or was just heartbroken. She couldn't tell yet, but either way, it was smothering, all of it.

What had happened in January should have freed her, but it trapped her back here instead, and she felt her eyes well up and wasn't it too far into everything to be still crying? Summer racing up on her. HELP NEEDED nearly set her off, but she couldn't cry here. Everyone watched everyone as they stepped in and out of the shops, the bookies, stopped at the coffee dock or sat over a plate of deli breakfast at Keeva's Kitchen in the scant food court under the huge, cold skylight, peering at other people's groceries through any thin spots in plastic carrier bags. Shell pulled her neck scarf up over her chin for comfort. She could at least pretend to be invisible then. Pretending was half the battle.

Even without the fabric over her nose and mouth, there was a thick in the air that you couldn't condition out, a gelatin feeling, suffocating. It made Shell feel like she was eight, fourteen, and perhaps like she was seventy-two and still here, in a shopping centre adjacent to her housing estate, still here, still in this place. Something wouldn't let her leave this part of the world and she had worked so hard to get gone. She had almost escaped.

She looked at the flowers in tall green buckets outside the florist that needed help and thought to herself that she would buy some and at home she'd draw them. They would cheer her parents up, act as a casual token of gratitude and appreciation, and keep her off her phone for a few hours tonight. They would also act as a very helpful excuse to inquire about what kind of help was needed, exactly, in this flower shop.

Excerpted from Eat the Ones You Love by Sarah Maria Griffin. Copyright © 2025 by Sarah Maria Griffin. Excerpted by permission of Tor Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.