The Writer’s Table by Valerie Stivers (Blog Tour)
In 2017, Valerie Stivers started writing about food in classic fiction for The Paris Review. Her particular project for the “Eat Your Words” column would be cooking and baking her way through literature. It was a larger undertaking than she realized and became something of an obsession. A selection of the greatest hits made it into The Writer’s Table. Each few-page biographical profile opens with a recipe drawn from that author’s work or developed by Stivers. A surprising number of writers published cookbooks – or had one compiled after their death – including Maya Angelou, Jane Austen (of family friend and housekeeper Martha Lloyd’s recipes), Ernest Hemingway, Barbara Pym, George Sand and Alice B. Toklas.
Though I’ve read a lot by and about D.H. Lawrence, I didn’t realise he did all the cooking in his household with Frieda, and was renowned for his bread. And who knew that Emily Dickinson was better known in her lifetime as a baker? Her coconut cake is beautifully simple, containing just six ingredients. Flannery O’Connor’s peppermint chiffon pie also sounds delicious. Some essays do not feature a recipe but a discussion of food in an author’s work, such as the unusual combinations of mostly tinned foods that Iris Murdoch’s characters eat. It turns out that that’s how she and her husband John Bayley ate, so she saw nothing odd about it. And Murakami’s 2005 New Yorker story “The Year of Spaghetti” is about a character whose fixation on one foodstuff reflects, Stivers notes, his “emotional … turmoil.”
The alphabetical arrangement of the pieces emphasizes the wide range of eras, regions, and genres. It’s a fun book for browsing, though I might have liked more depth on fewer authors. I especially liked the listicles on “Writers’ Favourite Cocktails” – E.B. White’s triple-strength gin martinis sound lethal! – and “Writers Who Didn’t Eat Proper Meals.” Proust subsisted on croissants and café au lait, while Highsmith ate nothing but bacon and eggs (hers being mostly a liquid diet). Katie Tomlinson’s colourful sketches are delightful. I enjoyed having this around to flick through and can recommend it as a gift for the literary foodie in your life.
With thanks to Anne Cater of Random Things Tours and Frances Lincoln (Quarto Books) for the free copy for review.
Buy The Writer’s Table from Bookshop.org [affiliate link]
I was pleased to be part of the blog tour for The Writer’s Table. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will appear soon.
April Releases by Chung, Ellis, Gaige, Lutz, McAlpine and Rubin
April felt like a crowded publishing month, though May looks to be twice as busy again. Adding this batch to my existing responses to books by Jean Hannah Edelstein & Emily Jungmin Yoon plus Richard Scott, I reviewed nine April releases. Today I’m featuring a real mix of books by women, starting with two foodie family memoirs, moving through a suspenseful novel about a lost hiker, a sparse Scandinavian novella, and a lovely poetry collection with themes of nature and family, and finishing up with a collection of aphorisms. I challenged myself to write just a paragraph on each for simplicity and readability.
Chinese Parents Don’t Say I Love You: A memoir of saying the unsayable with food by Candice Chung
“to love is to gamble, sometimes gastrointestinally … The stomach is a simple animal. But how do we settle the heart—a flailing, skittish thing?”
I got Caroline Eden (Cold Kitchen) and Nina Mingya Powles (Tiny Moons) vibes from this vibrant essay collection spotlighting food and family. The focus is on 2019–2021, a time of huge changes for Chung. She’s from Hong Kong via Australia, and reconnects with her semi-estranged parents by taking them along on restaurant review gigs for a Sydney newspaper. Fresh from a 13-year relationship with “the psychic reader,” she starts dating again and quickly falls in deep with “the geographer.” Sharing meals in restaurants and at home kindles closeness and keeps their spirits up after Covid restrictions descend. But when he gets a job offer in Scotland, they have to make decisions about their relationship sooner than intended. Although there is a chronological through line, the essays range in time and style, including second-person advice column (“Faux Pas”) and choose-your-own adventure (“Self-Help Meal”) segments alongside lists, message threads and quotes from the likes of Deborah Levy. My favourite piece was “The Soup at the End of the Universe.” Chung delicately contrasts past and present, singleness and being partnered, and different mental health states. The essays meld to capture a life in transition and the tastes and bonds that don’t alter.
With thanks to Elliott & Thompson for the free copy for review.
Chopping Onions on My Heart: On Losing and Preserving Culture by Samantha Ellis
Ellis was distressed to learn that her refugee parents’ first language, Judeo-Iraqi Arabic, is in danger of extinction. Her own knowledge of it is piecemeal, mostly confined to its colourful food-inspired sayings – for example, living “eeyam al babenjan (in the days of the aubergines)” means that everything feels febrile and topsy-turvy. She recounts her family’s history with conflict and displacement, takes a Zoom language class, and ponders what words, dishes, and objects she would save on an imaginary “ark” that she hopes to bequeath to her son. Along the way, she reveals surprising facts about Ashkenazi domination of the Jewish narrative. “Did you know the poet [Siegfried Sassoon] was an Iraqi Jew?” His great-grandfather even invented a special variety of mango pickle. All of the foods described sound delicious, and some recipes are given. Ellis’s writing is enthusiastic and she braids the book’s various strands effectively. I wasn’t as interested in the niche history as I wanted to be, but I did appreciate learning about an endangered culture and language.
With thanks to Chatto & Windus (Vintage/Penguin) for the proof copy for review.
Heartwood by Amity Gaige
This was on my Most Anticipated list after how much I’d enjoyed Sea Wife when we read it for Literary Wives club. In July 2022, 42-year-old nurse Valerie Gillis, nicknamed “Sparrow,” goes missing in the Maine woods while hiking the Appalachian Trail. An increasingly desperate search ensues as the chances of finding her alive diminish with each day. The shifting formats – letters, transcripts, news reports, tip line messages – hold the interest. However, the chapters voiced by Lt. Bev, the warden who heads the mission, are much the most engaging, and it’s a shame that her delightful interactions with her sisters and nieces are so few and come so late. The third-person passages about Lena Kucharski in her Connecticut retirement home are intriguing but somehow feel like they belong in a different book. Gaige attempts to bring the threads together through three mother–daughter pairs, which struck me as heavy-handed. Mostly, this hits the sweet spot between mystery and literary fiction (apart from some red herrings), but because I wasn’t particularly invested in the characters, even Valerie, this fell a little short of my expectations. (Read via Edelweiss)
Wild Boar by Hannah Lutz (2016; 2025)
[Translated from Swedish by Andy Turner]
“I have seen them, the wild boar, they have found their way into my dreams!” Ritve travels from Finland to the forests of southern Sweden to track the creatures. Glenn, who appraises project applications for the council, has boar wander onto his property in the middle of the night. Mia, recipient of a council grant for her Recollections of a Sigga Child proposal, brings her ailing grandfather to record his memories for the local sound archive. As midsummer approaches, these three characters plus a couple of their partners will have encounters with the boar and with each other. Short sections alternate between their first-person perspectives. There is a strong sense of place and how migration poses challenges for both the human and more-than-human worlds. But it’s over before it begins. I found myself frustrated by how little happens, how stingily the characters reveal themselves, and how the boar, ultimately, are no more than a metaphor or plot device – a frequent complaint of mine when animals are central to a narrative. This might appeal to fans of Melissa Harrison’s fiction. In any case, I congratulate The Emma Press on their first novel, which won an English PEN Award.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
Small Pointed Things by Erica McAlpine
McAlpine is an associate professor of English at Oxford. Her second poetry collection is full of flora and fauna imagery. The title phrase comes from the opening poem, “Bats and Swallows” – in the “gloaming,” it’s hard to tell the difference between the flying creatures. The verse is bursting with alliteration and end rhymes, as just this first one shows (emphasis mine): “we couldn’t see / from where we stood in soft shadows / any signs that they were swallows // or bats”; “One seemed almost iridescent / as I tried to track / its crescent / flight across the hill.” Other poems consider moths, manatees, bees, swans and ladybirds; snowdrops and a cedar tree. Part II expands the view through conversations, theories and travel. What-ifs, consequences and regrets seep in. Parts III and IV incorporate mythical allusions, elegies and the concerns of motherhood. Sometimes the rhyme scheme adheres to a particular form. For instance, I loved “Triolet on My Mother’s 74th Birthday” – “You cannot imagine one season in another. … You cannot imagine life without your mother.” This is just my sort of poetry, sweet on the ear and rooted in nature and the everyday. A sample poem:
“Clementines”
New Year’s Day – another turning
of the sphere, with all we planned
in yesteryear as close to hand
as last night’s coals left unmanned
in the fire, still orange and burning.
It is the season for clementines
and citrus from Seville
and whatever brightness carries us until
leaves and petals once more fill
the treetops and the vines.
If ever you were to confess
some cold truth about love’s
dwindling, now would be the time – less
in order for things to improve
than for the half-bitter happiness
of peeling rinds
during mid-winter
recalling days that are behind
us and doors we cannot re-enter
and other doors we couldn’t find.
With thanks to Carcanet Press for the advanced e-copy for review.
Secrets of Adulthood: Simple Truths for Our Complex Lives by Gretchen Rubin
Rubin is one of the best self-help authors out there: Her books are practical, well-researched and genuinely helpful. She understands human nature and targets her strategies to suit different personality types. If you know her work, you’re likely aware of her fondness for aphorisms. “Sometimes, a single sentence can provide all the insight we need,” she believes. Here she collects her own pithy sayings relating to happiness, self-knowledge, relationships, work, creativity and decision-making. Some of the aphorisms were familiar to me through her previous books or her social media. They’re straightforward and sensible, distilling down to a few words truths we might be aware of but hadn’t truly absorbed. Like the great aphorists throughout history, Rubin relishes alliteration, repetition and contrasts. Some examples:
Accept yourself, and expect more from yourself.
I admire nature, and I am also nature. I resent traffic, and I am also traffic.
Work is the play of adulthood. If we’re not failing, we’re not trying hard enough.
Don’t wait until you have more free time. You may never have more free time.
This is not as meaty as her other work, and some parts feel redundant, but that’s the nature of the project. It would make a good bedside book for nibbles of inspiration. (Read via Edelweiss)
Which of these appeal to you?
September Releases, Part I: Berzinska, Falomo, Fubini
September is always a big month for new releases. I reviewed a load for Shelf Awareness this month (excerpts and links in tomorrow’s post, along with one more full review) and I’m awaiting library holds of some other big-name titles.
As often seems to be the case, my main roundup features one book each from fiction, poetry and nonfiction. Today I have short reviews of a set of sweetly fantastical Latvian short stories for middle grade readers, a Nigerian American’s autobiography in verse, and a short book about how prioritizing flavour might be the key to fixing a broken globalized food system.
The Skeleton in the Cupboard by Lilija Berzinska (2018; 2024)
[Translated from the Latvian by Žanete Vēvere Pasqualini and Sara Smith]
Something a bit different that still fit my September short stories focus: these nine linked fairytales feature sentient animals and fantastical creatures learning relatable life lessons. In the title story, Squishbod airs his closet once a year, which requires taking out the skeleton – a symbol of shameful secrets one holds close. Newfound friendship shades into obsession in “The Sea Wolf and the Hare” before the hare’s epiphany that love requires freedom. Characters wrestle with greed, fear and feelings of inadequacy or incompleteness. In “The End of the World,” which can be interpreted as a subtle climate fable, a thick fog induces panic. A puffin entertains thoughts of piracy. Spendthrift is compelled to have the latest in home décor while Mousekin frets over his lack of ambition. This is perfect for Moomins fans, who will embrace the blend of domesticity and adventure, melancholy and reassurance. I was also reminded of another European children’s novel-in-stories I’ve reviewed, Scary Fairy in Wicked Wood by Jana Bauer (translated from the Slovenian). The book is illustrated with whimsical drawings by the author, and a translators’ note explains how they assigned the creatures punning names. This is meant for children aged eight and up, but I loved it, too.
With thanks to The Emma Press for the free copy for review.
In September-released short stories, I also recently reviewed A New Day by Sue Mell.
Autobiomythography Of by Ayokunle Falomo
The title is adapted from Audre Lorde’s term for Zami, “biomythography” (Kim Coleman Foote also borrowed it for Coleman Hill). This collection reminded me most of Jason Allen-Paisant’s multi-award-winning Self-Portrait as Othello. Both books pair an investigation of identity with musings on history and art, and six of Falomo’s poem titles begin with “Self-Portrait.” Another nine open with “Lugard & I,” referencing the early-1900s white high commissioner/governor/governor-general who effectively created Nigeria. Falomo contrasts his childhood understanding of his country with the more complicated postcolonial vision that has emerged in later decades.
Drawing on the Bible and mythology, the poet spins meditations on genealogy and describes himself as if from the outside, via others’ perceptions (“If Found,”) and erasure of official forms. “To You in Your Dark Lake Moving Darkly Now” is addressed to his child in utero, and a major theme is figuring out how to be a father differently from one’s own father (on which, see also Raymond Antrobus’s Signs, Music; I’ll link to my review tomorrow). The form varies a lot, from fragmented stanzas to paragraphs. I was impressed. A favourite passage (and a sample poem below):
The past will remain
what it is—a pastiche
of regrets and joys—
but lest I be accused of being
tethered to it, here is the snail-
sized horse I’ve named
Forgive. No, Forget.
Remind me.
I have forgotten who I was.
I have forgiven who I was supposed to be.
(from “Autobiography Of”)
With thanks to Alice James Books for the advanced e-copy for review.
In Search of the Perfect Peach: Why flavour holds the answer to fixing our food system by Franco Fubini
Fubini is the CEO of Natoora, which supplies produce to world-class restaurants. He is passionate about restoring seasonal patterns of eating; just because we can purchase strawberries year-round doesn’t mean we should. Supermarkets (which control 85% or more of food stock in the USA and UK) are to blame, Fubini explains, because after the Second World War they “tricked families with feelings of value and convenience, yet what they really wanted was for them to consume more of this unhealthy, flavour-engineered food [i.e. ultra-processed foods], which is cheap to produce and easy to transport because of its industrial nature.” He gives a few examples of fruits that have been selected for flavour rather than shelf life, such as the winter tomato varieties he popularized via River Café, green citrus, and the divine Greta white peach that set him off on this journey in 2011. This is a concise and readable introduction to modern food issues.
While it didn’t contain a lot that was new to me and I found the prose only serviceable, I’d still recommend it to anyone wanting a quick and thought-provoking read about where food comes from. Fubini’s is a wise voice we would do well to heed; I saw him quoted in the Guardian the other day on how to choose ripe fruit.
With thanks to Chelsea Green Publishing for the proof copy for review.
July Releases, II: Howard Norman, Andrés N. Ordorica, Neil D. A. Stewart
Three more July releases after yesterday’s Disability Pride Month special. Today is all fiction, but with rather different settings: Atlantic Canada, upstate New York and Mexico, and a London restaurant. The time period ranges from the last days of the First World War to 2013. The themes? Murder, plagues, accidental deaths and gourmet food in addition to those perennial subjects of finding love and coming to terms with identity.
Come to the Window by Howard Norman
This was my eighth book by Norman and felt most similar to My Darling Detective and Next Life Might Be Kinder. Nothing much happens in the Nova Scotia fishing village of Parrsboro – until the night in April 1918 that Elizabeth Frame shoots dead her husband of 11 hours and throws the revolver into the blowhole of a beached whale. The story is a boon for Toby Havenshaw, a journalist with the Halifax Evening Mail, and quickly becomes an obsession. It’s never a whodunit so much as a why as Toby reports on the trial and follows Elizabeth when she goes on the lam. The sordid case just keeps getting stranger, drawing in bigamy, illegitimate pregnancy, and so on.
But Norman never treats all this too seriously; it is almost a tragicomic foil to the more consequential matters of world war and an influenza pandemic, which soon has Atlantic Canada in its grip as well. Toby’s wife, Amelia, is a hospital surgeon operating on returning veterans. She’s so quietly capable she makes Toby look a dunce, and their everyday rapport and unusual road to parenthood in their late thirties are charming. I also enjoyed Norman’s Dickensian naming (Bevel Cousins, Dr. S. S. Particulate) and literary references: the title phrase is from Matthew Arnold, and L. M. Montgomery gets a mention.
No doubt Norman wrote this as a Covid response; the parallel with the Spanish flu has been irresistible for many. He really captures the feeling of living through a uniquely terrible world situation. However, I’m not sure this short novel will prove memorable. Such has been true for his other recent novels, which pale in comparison with The Bird Artist. (Read via Edelweiss)
How We Named the Stars by Andrés N. Ordorica
I learned about this through the Observer’s 10 best new novelists feature and requested a copy via a Northern Fiction Alliance online showcase. There’s a sweet Heartstopper vibe to the story of an unlikely romance blooming between Daniel de la Luna and Sam Morris, his roommate at the University of Cayuga (= Cornell). Sam is a hunky jock while Daniel is a nervous would-be writer who has only just become comfortable with calling himself gay.
Ordorica, also a poet, immediately sets an elegiac tone by revealing Sam’s untimely death soon after the end of their freshman year. To cope with losing the love of his life, Daniel writes this text as if it’s an extended letter to Sam, recounting the course of their relationship – from strangers to best friends to secret lovers – and telling of his summer spent in Mexico exploring his family history, especially the parallels between his life and that of his late uncle and namesake, who was brave enough to be openly gay in the early days of the AIDS crisis.
Unfortunately, solid ideas and a warm-hearted approach are swamped by a host of problems. Ordorica writes a pretty good sex scene but the rest is clichéd, purple or awkward prose (“I snapped photo after photo of you, laughing all the while from your infectious elation”; “I felt unmoored, unsettled, and utterly liminal, in a state of flux”; “I sank into my pillows, muffling my tears as my mind floundered into even deeper waves of sadness”) and stiff dialogue. The cultural references and terminology feel all wrong for 2011, let alone for the 1988 diary entries of Uncle Daniel’s. The Mexico subplot is too tidy and Daniel’s breakdown after news of Sam’s death, which appears to involve full-blown alcohol addiction, is implausibly resolved within a chapter. The characterization of the secondary figures, particularly Daniel’s trio of queer Cayuga friends, is tissue thin.
It seems likely that Ordorica channeled much of his own experience into this queer coming-of-age narrative. He may have been aiming for star-crossed lovers and a groundbreaking own voices story, but this is run-of-the-mill stuff – more like a college student’s first draft than a finished book.
With thanks to Saraband for the proof copy for review.
Test Kitchen by Neil D. A. Stewart
I spied this in one of Susan’s monthly previews. (If you haven’t already subscribed to her blog, do so at once. You’ll never be short of ideas for what to read.) Midgard is a fine dining restaurant with a tree in the middle whose multiple small courses evoke childhood memories and disguise one foodstuff as another. The London establishment earned two Michelin stars and has a perpetual waiting list, but as a news piece at the start presages, it will be forced to close its doors within five years after a series of disasters. Every other chapter introduces another set of diners, table by table: a first date, a reunion of old friends, a 12-year-old foodie trying to forestall his parents’ divorce, a restaurant critic and her freeloading acquaintances, and a solitary man who should really get that face wound seen to.
Many of these situations aren’t what they seem; the same goes for the intervening glimpses into the kitchen. Our host for these is Marley, the most recently hired waitress, who fled a chaotic home life in Melbourne. She didn’t show for work today; she’s in hiding, yet knows everything about the staff dynamics so is a perfect tour guide. There’s a mixture of nerves and bravado running through the kitchen as dinner starts. A knife accident, a food allergy, and a champagne cork hitting a customer are only the beginning of the evening’s mishaps. While I was initially drawn to the structure, which is almost like a linked short story collection, and I can’t resist a restaurant setting, the narrative trickery and the way that the mood evolves from slapstick to grotesque put me off. I enjoyed individual vignettes, but the whole didn’t come together as satisfyingly as in Sweetbitter or Service, among others.
With thanks to Corsair (Hachette) for the free copy for review.
Any July releases you’d recommend?
Carol Shields Prize Longlist Reads: Cocktail & Land of Milk and Honey
Two final reviews in advance of tomorrow’s shortlist announcement: a sophisticated, nostalgic short story collection and an intense future-set novel full of the pleasures of the flesh. Both make it onto my wish list at the end of this post.
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
The 12 stories of this debut collection brought to mind Tessa Hadley and Alice Munro for their look back at chic or sordid 1960s–1980s scenes and dysfunctional families or faltering marriages. They’re roughly half and half first-person and third-person (five versus seven). The title story opens the book with a fantastic line: “The problem with parties, my mother says, is people don’t drink enough.” Later, the narrator elaborates:
Her meaning is that if people drank more, they’d loosen up. Parties would be more fun, like they used to be. And I laugh along. Yes, I say, letting her top up my glass of Chardonnay. That’s it, not enough booze. But I’m thinking about Tom Collins.
Not the drink, but an alias a party guest used when he stumbled into her bedroom looking for a toilet. She was about eleven at this point and she and her brother vaguely resented being shut away from their parents’ parties. While for readers this is an uncomfortable moment as we wonder if she’s about to be molested, in memory it’s taken on a rosy glow for her – a taste of adult composure and freedom that she has sought with every partner and every glass of booze since. This was a pretty much perfect story, with a knock-out ending to boot.
Dependence on alcohol recurs, and “Hawthorne Yellow,” is also about a not-quite affair, between a restless stay-at-home mother and the decorator who discovers antique sketches in the old servants’ quarters of her home. “Orlando, 1974” again contrasts childhood nostalgia with seedy reality: Disney World should have been an idyll, but the narrator mostly remembers a lot of vomiting. “Old Growth” and “Bear Country” have Ray renegotiating his relationship with his son after divorcing Gwyneth. “Hyacinth Girl,” too, is about complicated stepfamilies, while “Wise Men Say” looks back at cross-class romance. The protagonist of “Maeve” feels she can’t match the title character’s perfect parenting skills; the first-person plural in “Pomegranate” portrays a group of wild convent schoolgirls.
“Little Girl Lost” was the most Hadley-meets-Munro, with an alcoholic painter’s daughter seen first as a half-feral child and later as a hippie young woman. “How the Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” was the least essential with its elderly narrator piecing things together in the aftermath of a burglary. Along with the title story, the standout for me was “Bundle of Joy,” about a persnickety grandmother going to her daughter’s place to spend time with her new grandson. She disapproves of just about every decision Erin has made (leaving the dogs’ frozen turds in the backyard all winter, for instance), but her interference threatens to have lasting consequences. Not a dud in the dozen, and a very strong voice I’ll expect to read much more from. (Read via Edelweiss; published by Biblioasis) 
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
We all die. We have only the choice, if we are privileged, of whether death comes with a whimper or a bang; of what worlds we taste before we go.
A real step up from How Much of These Hills Is Gold, which I read for book club last year – while it was interesting to see the queer, BIPOC spin Zhang put on the traditional Western, I found her Booker-longlisted debut bleak and strange in such a detached way that it was hard to care about. By contrast, I was fully involved in her sensuous and speculative second novel.
A 29-year-old Chinese American chef is exiled when the USA closes its borders while she’s working in London. On a smog-covered planet where 98% of crops have failed, scarcity reigns – but there is a world apart, a mountaintop settlement at the Italian border where money can buy any ingredient desired and threatened foods are cultivated in a laboratory setting. While peasants survive on mung bean flour, wealthy backers indulge in classic French cuisine. The narrator’s job is to produce lavish, evocative multi-course meals to bring investors on board. Foie gras, oysters, fine wines; heirloom vegetables; fruits not seen for years. But also endangered creatures and mystery meat wrested back from extinction. Her employer’s 21-year-old daughter, Aida, oversees the lab where these rarities are kept alive.
Ironically, surrounded with such delicacies, the chef loses her appetite for all but cigarettes – yet another hunger takes over. Her relationship with Aida is a passionate secret made all the more peculiar by the fact that the chef’s other role is to impersonate Aida’s dead mother, Eun-Young. It’s clear this precarious setup can’t last; ambition and technology keep moving on. The novel presents such a striking picture of desire at the end of the world. Each sentence is honed to flawlessness, with whole paragraphs of fulsome descriptions of meals. Zhang’s prose reminded me of Stephanie Danler’s and R.O. Kwon’s – no surprise, then, that they’re on the Acknowledgments list, as are a cornucopia of foods and other literary influences.
I’m not usually one for a dystopian novel, but the emotional territory keeps this one grounded even as the plot grows more sinister. My only complaint is that I would have left off the final chapter as I don’t think tracing the protagonist through four more decades of life adds much. I would rather have left this world in limbo than thought of the episode as a blip in a facile regeneration process – that’s the most unrealistic element of all. But this has still been my favourite read from the longlist so far. And there’s even a faithful pet cat, a “recalcitrant beast” that keeps coming back to the chef despite benign neglect. (Public library) 
My ideal shortlist, based on what I’ve read and still want to read, would be:
Cocktail by Lisa Alward
Dances by Nicole Cuffey
Brotherless Night by V.V. Ganeshananthan
I Have Some Questions for You by Rebecca Makkai
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
I wouldn’t be averse to seeing The Future or Chrysalis on there either. (Just not Loot, please!)
See Laura’s post for a recap of her reviews and her wish list. Marcie has also been reading from the longlist; see her first write-up here.
My Most Anticipated Releases of 2024
I feel a sense of freedom and anticipation about the reading opportunities stretching out ahead of me and want to preserve that, so apart from participating in my usual challenges and trying to read more from my own shelves, I have no specific reading goals for the year. (My ever-growing set-aside shelf does make me feel guilty, though.)
Knowing myself, close to half of my reading will be current-year releases. I’ve already read 10 releases from 2024 (8 are written up here), and I’m also looking forward to new work from Julia Armfield, Tracy Chevalier, Matt Gaw, Garth Risk Hallberg, Sheila Heti, Ann Hood, Rachel Khong, Sarah Manguso, Tommy Orange, Francesca Segal, Joe Shute and J. Courtney Sullivan. If there’s a recurring theme here, it’s sophomore novels from authors whose debuts I loved. Only a few nonfiction releases are musts for me.
I’ve chosen the dozen below as my most anticipated titles that I know about so far. They are arranged in UK release date order, within sections by genre. (U.S. details given too/instead if USA-only.) Quotes are excerpts from the publisher blurbs, e.g., from Goodreads. I’ve noted if I have sourced a review copy already.
Fiction
Wellness by Nathan Hill [Jan. 25, Picador; has been out since September from Knopf] Hill’s debut novel, The Nix, was fantastic. I’ve developed an allergy to doorstoppers over the past year, but am determined to read this anyway. “Moving from the gritty 90s Chicago art scene to a suburbia of detox diets and home renovation hysteria, Wellness mines the absurdities of modern technology and modern love to reveal profound, startling truths about intimacy and connection.” Has been likened to Egan, Franzen and Strout. (Print proof copy)
The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez [Jan. 25, Virago; has been out since November from Riverhead] I’ve read and loved three of Nunez’s novels. I’m a third of the way into this, “a meditation on our contemporary era, as a solitary female narrator asks what it means to be alive at this complex moment in history … Humor, to be sure, is a priceless refuge. Equally vital is connection with others, who here include an adrift member of Gen Z and a spirited parrot named Eureka.” (Print proof copy)
Come and Get It by Kiley Reid [Jan. 30, Bloomsbury / Jan. 9, G.P. Putnam’s] Such a Fun Age was a surprise hit with me, so I’m keen to try her second novel, set on a college campus. “It’s 2017 at the University of Arkansas. Millie Cousins, a senior resident assistant, wants to graduate, get a job, and buy a house. So when Agatha Paul, a [lesbian] visiting professor and writer, offers Millie an easy yet unusual opportunity, she jumps at the chance. But Millie’s starry-eyed hustle becomes jeopardised by odd new friends, vengeful dorm pranks and illicit intrigue.” (NetGalley download / public library reservation)
Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar [March 7, Picador /Jan. 23, Knopf] I’ve read Akbar’s two full-length poetry collections and particularly admired Pilgrim Bell. His debut novel sounds kind of unhinged, but I figure it’s worth a try. “When Cyrus’s obsession with the lives of the martyrs – Bobby Sands, Joan of Arc – leads him to a chance encounter with a dying artist, he finds himself drawn towards the mysteries of an uncle who rode through Iranian battlefields dressed as the Angel of Death; and toward his [late] mother, who may not have been who or what she seemed.” (NetGalley download)
Memory Piece by Lisa Ko [March 7, Dialogue Books / March 19, Riverhead] Ko’s debut, The Leavers, was a favourite of mine from 2018, so it was great to hear that she is coming out with a new book. “Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong [female, Asian American] friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.”
The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl [April 23, Random House] I’m reading this for an early Shelf Awareness review. It’s fairly breezy but enjoyable, with an expected foodie theme plus hints of magic but also trauma from the protagonist’s upbringing. “When her estranged mother dies, Stella is left with an unusual gift: a one-way plane ticket, and a note reading ‘Go to Paris’. But Stella is hardly cut out for adventure … When her boss encourages her to take time off, Stella resigns herself to honoring her mother’s last wishes.” (PDF review copy)
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry [May 2, Jonathan Cape / May 7, Mariner Books] “Thomas Hart and Grace Macauley are fellow worshippers at the Bethesda Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits – torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love.” Sounds a lot like The Essex Serpent (which is a very good thing) but with astronomy. (Print proof copy)
The Ministry of Time, Kaliane Bradley [May 7, Sceptre/Avid Reader Press] “A time travel romance, a speculative spy thriller, a workplace comedy, and an ingeniously constructed exploration of the nature of truth and power and the potential for love to change it. In the near future, a civil servant is offered the salary of her dreams and is, shortly afterward, told what project she’ll be working on. A recently established government ministry is gathering ‘expats’ from across history to establish whether time travel is feasible—for the body, but also for the fabric of space-time.” Promises to be zany and fun.
Exhibit by R.O. Kwon [May 21, Virago/Riverhead] I loved The Incendiaries and look forward to reading this next month for an early Shelf Awareness review. “At a lavish party in the hills outside of San Francisco, Jin Han meets Lidija Jung and nothing will ever be the same for either woman. A brilliant, young photographer, Jin is at a crossroads in her work, in her marriage to college sweetheart Phillip, in who she is and who she wants to be. Lidija is a glamorous, injured world-class ballerina on hiatus from her ballet company under mysterious circumstances. Drawn to each other by their intense artistic drives, the two women talk all night.” Bisexual rep from Kwon. (PDF review copy)
Nonfiction
Fi: A Memoir of My Son by Alexandra Fuller [April 9, Grove Press] Fuller is one of the best memoirists out there (Don’t Let’s Go to the Dogs Tonight and Leaving Before the Rains Come), and I read pretty much every bereavement memoir I can get my hands on anyway. “It’s midsummer in Wyoming and Alexandra is barely hanging on. Grieving her father and pining for her home country of Zimbabwe, reeling from a midlife breakup, freshly sober and piecing her way uncertainly through a volatile new relationship with a younger woman, Alexandra vows to get herself back on even keel. And then – suddenly and incomprehensibly – her son Fi, at 21 years old, dies in his sleep.” (PDF review copy)
Cairn by Kathleen Jamie [June 13, Sort Of Books] Thanks to Paul (I link to his list below) for letting me know about this one. I’ll read anything Kathleen Jamie writes. “Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers. For the last five years … Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.” Which leads nicely into…
Poetry
Rapture’s Road by Seán Hewitt [Jan. 11, Jonathan Cape] Hewitt’s debut collection, Tongues of Fire, was brilliant. This sounds like more of the same: “these poems forge their own unique path through the landscape. … Following the reciprocal relationship between queer sexuality and the natural world that he explored in [his previous book, the poet conjures us here into a trance: a deep delirium of hypnotic, hectic rapture where everything is called into question, until a union is finally achieved – a union in nature, with nature.”
Other lists for more ideas:
Electric Lit (all by women of color, as chosen by R.O. Kwon)
Kate – we overlap on a couple of our picks
Laura – we overlap on a few of our picks
Paul (mostly nonfiction)
What catches your eye here? What other 2024 titles do I need to know about?
My Best Backlist Reads of the Year
Like many bloggers, I’m irresistibly drawn to the new books released each year. However, I consistently find that many of my more memorable reads were published earlier – most of these happen to have been published between one and a few years ago, with the ‘oldest’ being from 2004. These dozen selections – alphabetical within genre but in no particular rank order – together with my Best of 2023 post (coming up tomorrow), make up about the top 10% of my year’s reading.
Fiction
Loved and Missed by Susie Boyt: The heart-wrenching story of a woman who adopts her granddaughter because of her daughter’s drug addiction. The prose is stunning as Boyt traces the history of this complicated, makeshift family. The title has a wry double meaning, but also connotations of anticipatory grief. There can be love even where there is estrangement, or eternal separation. That is one of the enduring messages of this gem of a short novel.
Homesick by Jennifer Croft: Each vignette – some just a paragraph long – is perfectly chosen to reveal a family dynamic and a moment in American history. What Croft does so brilliantly is to chart the accretion of ordinary and landmark events that form a life. In the end it didn’t matter whether this was presented as memoir or autofiction, so true was it to the experience of 1990s girlhood, as well as to sisterhood and coming of age.
Search by Michelle Huneven: When middle-aged restaurant critic Dana Potowski is invited to be on the search committee to appoint the next minister for her California Unitarian church, she reluctantly agrees but soon wonders whether the experience could be interesting fodder for a new book… The setup might seem niche but will resonate with anyone who’s had a brush with bureaucracy. Pure pleasure; lit fic full of gossip and good food.
Under the Rainbow by Celia Laskey: Researchers identified Big Burr, Kansas as the most homophobic town in America. An Acceptance Across America task force descends on the rural backwater for a two-year program promoting education and friendship. Each chapter in the linked short story collection is a first-person, present-tense confession from a local or a queer visitor, whose stories interlock. Laskey inhabits all 11 with equal skill and compassion.
The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry: This utterly immersive novel examines Thomas Hardy’s relationship with his first wife, Emma Gifford. It opens on the morning of her death. The couple had long been estranged, but Hardy was instantly struck with grief – and remorse, his guilt compounded by what he found in her journals. A universal tale of waning romance, loss, and regret. Beautifully understated; perfectly convincing for the period but also timeless.
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout: As Covid hits, William whisks Lucy from her NYC apartment to a house at the Maine coast. She’s an Everywoman recounting the fear and confusion of the early pandemic. Isolation has benefits: the first ‘room of her own’ she’s ever had, and time to ponder her childhood trauma and what went wrong in her marriage. Astute on American politics and writers’ inspirations; an effortless voice and emotional intelligence.
Nonfiction
Bibliomaniac by Robin Ince: Ince was meant to undertake a stadium tour in Autumn 2021, but a Covid resurgence put paid to that. Not one for sitting around at home, he formulated Plan B: 100+ events, most of them in independent bookshops, over the course of two months, criss-crossing Britain and hitting many of my favourites. He’s not just a speaker at them but, invariably, a customer. I sensed a kindred spirit in so many lines. Witty and open-minded.
A Line in the World by Dorthe Nors: Nors lives in rural Jutland along the west coast of Denmark – little visited and largely unknown to foreigners. This can be both good and bad. Tourists feel they’re discovering somewhere new, but the residents are insular. Local legends and traditions, bird migration, reliance on the sea, wanderlust, maritime history, a visit to church frescoes, and more. Gorgeous writing and atmosphere, despite the bleakness.
Here and Now by Henri Nouwen: This collection of micro-essays under themed headings like “Living in the Present” and “Suffering” is a perfect introduction to the Dutch Catholic priest’s theology. I marked out many reassuring or thought-provoking passages. I was taken by his ideas that the life of compassion is one of “downward mobility” and that inner freedom comes when you don’t judge anyone. Peaceful and readable; a good bedside devotional.
Poetry
Ephemeron by Fiona Benson: Exquisite poems about the ephemeral, whether that be insect lives, boarding school days, primal emotions or moments from her children’s early years. The book is in four discrete corresponding sections but themes and language bleed from one into another and the whole is shot through with astonishing corporeality and eroticism. The form varies but the alliteration, slant rhymes and unexpected metaphors make each poem glisten.
Leave Me a Little Want by Beverly Burch: Burch’s fourth collection juxtaposes the cosmic and the mundane, marvelling at the behind-the-scenes magic that goes into one human being born but also making poetry of an impatient wait in a long post office queue. Beset by environmental anxiety and the scale of bad news during the pandemic, she pauses in appreciation of the small and gradual.
Making the Beds for the Dead by Gillian Clarke: Full of colour and nature imagery, profuse with alliteration and slant rhymes, relishing its specialist terminology, and taking on the serious subject matter of manmade disasters. Several sequences are devoted to gardening and geology; some pieces are ekphrastic, or dedicated to particular poets. The title sequence tackles the 2001foot and mouth disease outbreak. “The Fall” is on 9/11. Very affecting stuff.
My overall favourites were: in novels, Search and The Chosen (one contemporary and one historical) and in poetry, Ephemeron.
What were your best backlist reads this year?
Book Serendipity, October to December 2023
I call it “Book Serendipity” when two or more books that I read at the same time or in quick succession have something in common – the more bizarre, the better. This is a regular feature of mine every couple of months. Because I usually have 20–30 books on the go at once, I suppose I’m more prone to such incidents. The following are in roughly chronological order.
- A woman turns into a spider in Edith Holler by Edward Carey and The Human Origins of Beatrice Porter and Other Essential Ghosts by Soraya Palmer.
- Expulsion from Eden scenes (one literal, after the Masaccio painting; another more figurative by association) in Conversation Among Stones by Willie Lin and North Woods by Daniel Mason.
- Reading my second 2023 release featuring a theatre fire (after The House Is on Fire by Rachel Beanland, which I actually read last year): Edith Holler by Edward Carey.
- The protagonist cuts their foot in The Rituals by Rebecca Roberts and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.
- On the same evening, I started two novels where the protagonist’s parents both died in a car crash: The Witches by Roald Dahl and Family Meal by Bryan Washington. This is something I encounter ALL THE TIME in fiction (versus extremely rarely in life) and it’s one of my major pet peeves. I can excuse it more in the children’s book as the orphan trope allows for adventures, but for the most part it just seems lazy to me. The author has decided they don’t want to delve into a relationship with parents at all, so they cut it out in the quickest and easiest possible way.
- A presumed honour killing in Behind You Is the Sea by Susan Muaddi Darraj and The Hundred and Ninety-Nine Steps by Michel Faber.
- A Houston, Texas setting in The Only Way Through Is Out by Suzette Mullen and Family Meal by Bryan Washington.
- Daniel Clowes, whose graphic novel Monica I was also in the middle of at the time, was mentioned in Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac.
- The author/speaker warns the squeamish reader to look away for a paragraph in Robin Ince’s Bibliomaniac (recounting details of a gross-out horror plot) and one chapter of Daniel Mason’s North Woods.
- A mentally ill man who lives at the end of a lane in Daniel Mason’s North Woods and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward.
- Reading Last House before the Mountain by Monika Helfer and The Last House on Needless Street by Catriona Ward at the same time.
- The Daedalus myth (via Aeschylus or Brueghel, or just in general) is mentioned in Last House before the Mountain by Monika Helfer, The Ghost Orchid by Michael Longley, and Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
- A character goes to live with their aunt and uncle in Western Lane by Chetna Maroo and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (both Booker-longlisted), but also The Woman in Black by Susan Hill, Train Dreams by Denis Johnson, and The Story Girl by L.M. Montgomery. I came across all five instances within a few days! Later I also encountered a brief mention of this in Ferdinand by Irmgard Keun. How can this situation be so uncommon in life but so common in fiction?!
- The outdated terms “Chinaman” and “coolie” appear frequently in Train Dreams by Denis Johnson and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- A 15-year-old declares true love in The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and Absolutely and Forever by Rose Tremain.
- A French character named Pascal in The Inseparables by Simone de Beauvoir and The Garrick Year by Margaret Drabble.
- A minor character called Mrs Biggs in Harriet Said… by Beryl Bainbridge and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- The Chinese zither (guzheng) is mentioned in Dear Chrysanthemums by Fiona Sze-Lorrain, which I read earlier in the year, and The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng.
- Oscar Wilde’s trial is mentioned in The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng, as it was in The New Life by Tom Crewe, which I read earlier in the year – in both it was a cautionary case for older homosexual characters (based on real people: W. Somerset Maugham vs. John Addington Symonds) who were married to women but had a live-in male secretary generally known to be their lover. At the same time as I was reading The House of Doors, I was rereading Wilde’s De Profundis, which was written from prison.
- In Fifty Days of Solitude Doris Grumbach mentions reading Bear by Marian Engel. I read both during Novellas in November.
- Living funerals are mentioned in Ferdinand by Irmgard Keun and The Ritual Effect by Michael Norton.
- A character insists that lilac not be included in a bouquet in In the Sweep of the Bay by Cath Barton and Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll.
- A woman has a lover named Frances in Bright Young Women by Jessica Knoll and The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde.
- The final word of the Fanny Howe poem in Raised by Wolves (the forthcoming 50th anniversary poetry anthology from Graywolf Press) is “theophanies.” At the same time, I was reading the upcoming poetry collection Theophanies by Sarah Ghazal Ali.
- The Cancer Journals by Audre Lorde, which I’d read the month before, was a major influence on the cancer memoir All In by Caitlin Breedlove.
- Two foodie memoirs I read during our city break, A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm and The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz, both likened a group of young men to a Dolce & Gabbana ad. (Chisholm initially lived at Porte des Lilas, the next Metro stop up from where we stayed in Mairie des Lilas.)
- A French slang term for penis, “verge,” is mentioned in both The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz and Learning to Drive by Katha Pollitt.
What’s the weirdest reading coincidence you’ve had lately?
Three Days in Paris and What I Read
My husband’s belated 40th birthday treat was a short city break in Paris earlier this week. No sooner had I gotten home on Tuesday than I was sealing up my suitcase to fly to the States the following afternoon. It’s been quite the whirlwind week (make that few months), but now that things have quieted down a little, I have a chance to look back on the long weekend’s eating, sightseeing and reading. I’d been to Paris twice before: once just for an overnight en route to Milan in 2019, while my first and only proper trip was in early 2004.
That time I did all the touristy things like the Eiffel Tower, the Musée d’Orsay (though not the Louvre), Notre Dame and the site of the Bastille. A sign of how times have changed: nearly 20 years ago when I was at Père Lachaise cemetery, you could go right up to Oscar Wilde’s grave and add your lip-print to the many kisses on it. (There’s a photo of me and my study abroad friend doing just that; I wish I’d had time to go dig it out of an album.) Today it’s walled off by Perspex with a note explaining that the family pay all the cleaning costs. To think that there are descendants of Wilde’s out there in the world! Still, a tiny letdown when it was such a cute ritual. We also visited Chopin and Balzac and took in the views.
The most touristy things we did this time around were Sainte-Chapelle, a marvel of medieval stained glass, and Shakespeare and Company, the famous English-language haunt of expats over the decades. Notre Dame is still closed for its extensive post-fire restoration (it’s due to reopen next year) but you can read some signboards about the reconstruction outside and sit on the bleachers to soak in the atmosphere. Our other destinations included the Hotel de Ville, lit up at night with a Christmas market to advertise the 2024 Olympics, and the Jardin des Plantes and its museum of paleontology and comparative anatomy – old-fashioned in just the way we like it, with row upon row of skeletons and lots of hand-inked original labels.
We were mostly in the city to eat, and eat we did. Many of our recommendations for boulangeries and patisseries came from American chef David Lebovitz’s blog. Although we did buy traditional baguettes and croissants, we were mostly on the lookout for unusual treats, such as hay-flavoured custard-filled choux buns and a famous maple syrup tart. We had one bistro meal and another at a creperie, this one incorporating Breton-Japanese fusion dishes such as my Breizh rolls, cut from a buckwheat galette filled with artichoke hearts, seaweed, scrambled egg and Comté cheese: a cross between a crêpe and sushi.
We enjoyed riding the Métro and by the time we left felt like pros at it. Speaking French to shopkeepers and waitstaff had also started to become second nature (I even managed to query errors in our order/bill twice at restaurants). The weather was showery and colder than expected, but never enough to spoil our experience, and we stole some good glimpses of the Tower from around the city.
But the highlight of the trip was something we stumbled upon and joined in on a whim. At Shakespeare and Company on our first full day, we spotted a sign for a free event they were hosting the next night: the recording of a podcast by comedian Greg Proops, followed by mince pies, mulled wine and carol singing.
We had never heard of Proops but thought we’d take a chance, so made our way back the next evening and got two of the last seats left in the back of the upstairs space. His monologue was funnier than expected, mostly a stringing together of in-jokes about national stereotypes of the English, Americans and French – but as we all know, clichés are amusing precisely because they contain grains of truth. He also had a few long anecdotes about getting eye surgery and running into a famous old film director in Paris. It sounds like this bookshop event is an annual tradition for him.
Best of all, afterwards the shop was technically closed but we were allowed to stay in – lock-in at the bookshop! They don’t normally allow photographs inside, but my husband managed to sneak a few plus some video of the carol singing. The mince pies, gingerbread and mulled wine were all tasty. Professor Lex Paulson at the piano led us in a marathon of 22 songs ranging from ancient traditionals (“O Come O Come Emmanuel” and “The Coventry Carol”) to recent pop (“Last Christmas” and “All I Want for Christmas Is You”); it must be said that there was more general enthusiasm for the latter, while my husband and I were among the few raring for “The Holly and the Ivy” and suchlike. A truly unforgettable evening.
I’d read one memoir of working and living in Shakespeare and Company, Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs by Jeremy Mercer (original title: Time Was Soft There), back in 2017. I don’t remember it being particularly special as bookish memoirs go, but if you want an insider’s look at the bookshop that’s one option. Founder Sylvia Beach herself also wrote a memoir. The best part of any trip is preparing what books to take and read. I had had hardly any time to plan what else to pack, and ended up unprepared for the cold, but I had my shelf of potential reads ready weeks in advance. I took The Elegance of the Hedgehog by Muriel Barbery and read the first 88 pages before giving up. This story of several residents of the same apartment building, their families and sadness and thoughts, was reminiscent of Sophie’s World and didn’t grip me. But here’s what I did read, in chronological order (all: ):
Broderies by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
The fifth-floor Airbnb apartment where we stayed in the suburb of Mairie des Lilas overlooked a school and housed an amazing collection of graphic novels in French. I picked this one up to flick through because I remember enjoying Persepolis, but to my surprise I could understand just about every line bar a very few vocabulary words that I skipped over or grasped in context, so I read the whole thing over a couple of breakfasts and evening glasses of wine.
After a dinner party, Marji helps her grandmother serve tea from a samovar to their female family friends, and the eight Iranian women swap stories about their love lives. These are sometimes funny, but mostly sad and slightly shocking tales about arranged marriages, betrayals, and going to great lengths to entrap or keep a man. They range from a woman who has birthed four children but never seen a penis to a mistress who tried to use mild witchcraft to get a marriage proposal. What is most striking is how standards of beauty and purity have endured in this culture, leading women to despair over their loss of youth and virginity.
I think the title may have some slang meaning relating to the hymen? But in English translation it is Embroideries, referring to the way these women stitch together their life stories and their relationships. All the scenes are in black and white with a readable cursive handwriting for the plentiful text. It was a more talky graphic novel than I tend to prefer, but I learned a lot of good phrases from it, and found it a real joy to read. It must be the first book I have read in French since my university days!
The Sweet Life in Paris by David Lebovitz (2009)
We both read this, keeping two bookmarks in and trading it off on Metro journeys. The short thematic chapters, interspersed with recipes, were perfect for short bursts of reading, and the places and meals he described often presaged what we experienced. His observations on the French, too, rang true for us. Why no shower curtains? Why so much barging and cutting in line? Parisians are notoriously rude and selfish, and France’s bureaucracy is something I’ve read about in multiple places this year, including John Lewis-Stempel’s La Vie.
Lebovitz has happily called the city home for two decades now, and performs culinary feats (testing the recipes for his dessert cookbooks) in a tiny apartment kitchen. There are sections here on fish, cheese, chocolate, and so on, but also on particular shopping areas and typically French incidents, such as everyone being on strike at the same time. One chapter was a hymn to G. Detou (a play on words meaning “I have it all”), a food emporium my husband was especially excited to visit. This was breezy and affectionate, a perfect travel companion.
A Waiter in Paris by Edward Chisholm (2022)
This was consciously based on George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, but more so than an exposé of working-class poverty and abuses of power in the restaurant world, it is a rollicking narrative of living hand to mouth and trying to gain acceptance as a waiter. I enjoyed it in much the same way that I did Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain and Sweetbitter by Stephanie Danler: this is a high-stress, macho world I would never want to be a part of myself, but reading about it is intriguing. After Chisholm broke up with his girlfriend, he lived in a bedbug-ridden garret and often did 14-hour shifts as a runner at the “Bistrot de la Seine,” which packed in hundreds of tables and served thousands of meals daily. As “l’Anglais,” with no proper contract or social security, Chisholm was overlooked but determined to become a waiter. Though he felt fraternity with his colleagues, day-to-day life was brutal. He survived on coffee, cigarettes, and stolen rolls, and caught few-hour naps in the toilets of upscale restaurants. The waiters were cut-throat in their competition for tips, and the chefs, mostly Tamil, worked in a basement inferno. His pen portraits of these characters are particularly Orwellian. The account is as vivid and engrossing as a novel.
I forgot to start it while I was there, but did soon afterwards: The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl, forthcoming in early 2024. When Stella’s elegant, aloof mother Celia dies, she leaves her $8,000 – and instructions to go to Paris and not return to New York until she’s spent it all. At 2nd & Charles yesterday, I also picked up a clearance copy of A Paris All Your Own, an autobiographical essay collection edited by Eleanor Brown, to reread. I like to keep the spirit of a vacation alive a little longer, and books are one of the best ways to do that.
The Lost Supper by Taras Grescoe (Blog Tour)
“Searching for the Future of Food in the Flavors of the Past” is the instructive subtitle of this globe-trotting book of foodie exploration in the vein of A Cook’s Tour and The Omnivore’s Dilemma. With its firm grounding in history, it also reminded me of Twain’s Feast. Journalist Tara Grescoe is based in Montreal. Dodging Covid lockdowns, he managed to make visits to the homes of various traditional foods, such as the more nutritious emmer wheat that sustained the Çatalhöyük settlement in Turkey 8,500 years ago; the feral pigs that live on Ossabaw Island off of Georgia, USA: the Wensleydale cheese that has been made in Yorkshire for more than 700 years; the olive groves of Puglia; and the potato-like tuber called camas that is a staple for the Indigenous peoples of Vancouver Island.
One of the most fascinating chapters is about the quest to recreate “garum,” a fermented essence of salted fish (similar to modern-day Asian fish sauces) used ubiquitously by the Romans. Grescoe journeys to Cádiz, Spain, where the sauce is being made again in accordance with the archaeological findings at Pompeii. He experiences a posh restaurant tasting menu where garum features in every dish – even if just a few drops – and then has a go at making his own. “Garum seemed to subject each dish to the culinary equivalent of italicization,” he found, intensifying the existing flavours and giving an inimitable umami hit. I’m also intrigued by the possibilities of entomophagy (eating insects) so was interested in his hunt for water boatman eggs, “the caviar of Mexico”; and his outing to the world’s largest edible insect farm near Peterborough, Ontario.
Grescoe seems to be, like me, a flexitarian, focusing on plants but indulging in occasional high-quality meat and fish. He advocates for eating as locally as you can, and buying from small producers whose goods reflect the care taken over the raising. “Everybody who eats cheap, factory-made meat is eating suffering,” he insists, having compared an industrial-scale slaughterhouse in North Carolina with small farms of heritage pigs. He acknowledges other ecological problems, too, however, such as the Ossabaw hogs eating endangered loggerhead turtles’ eggs and the overabundance of sheep in the Yorkshire Dales leading to a loss of plant diversity. This ties into the ecological conscience that is starting to creep into foodie lit (as opposed to a passé Bourdain eat-everything mindset), as witnessed by Dan Saladino’s Eating to Extinction winning the Wainwright Prize (Conservation) last year.
Another major theme of the book is getting involved in the food production process yourself, however small the scale (growing herbs or tomatoes on a balcony, for instance). “With every home food-making skill I acquired, I felt like I was tapping into some deep wellspring of self-sufficiency that connected me to my historic—and even prehistoric—ancestors,” Grescoe writes. He also cites American farmer-philosopher Wendell Berry’s seven principles for responsible eating, as relevant now as they were in the 1980s. The book went a little deeper into history and anthropology than I needed, but there was still plenty here to hold my interest. Readers may not follow Grescoe into grinding their own wheat or making their own cheese, but we can all be more mindful about where our food comes from, showing gratitude rather than entitlement. This was a good Nonfiction November and pre-Thanksgiving read!
With thanks to Random Things Tours and Greystone Books for the proof copy for review.
Buy The Lost Supper from Bookshop UK [affiliate link]
I was delighted to be part of the blog tour for The Lost Supper. See below for details of where other reviews have appeared or will be appearing soon.
Bookish Beck = Rebecca Foster. American transplant to England. Freelance proofreader and book reviewer.
Bookish Beck 