With holidays in full swing you might find yourself in need of a little break from the table. Here are a few novels that celebrate food in fiction. How it brings us together, pushes us apart, or leads us on an adventure to sights, sounds, and smells we never knew before.
The Lager Queen of Minnesota by J. Ryan Stradal
Edith Magnusson never thought she’d be figuring out how to translate the flavors of her award-winning pies into beer, but she’s had plenty of practice being adaptable. Ever since her father left the family farm to her sister, Helen, Edith has learned to make do on her own. She and her husband raised their children comfortably, but not extravagantly, and no job was ever too small for Edith. When her granddaughter, Diana, turns a severance package into ownership of a fledgling craft brewery, she’s surprised to find that brewing is in the family bloodline. A chance to mend decades-old resentment resurfaces, and Edith, Helen, and Diana have to decide how to best navigate the tricky waters of reconciliation.
Chronicles of a Radical Hag (with Recipes) by Lorna Landvik
While Haze (short for Hazel) Evans lies in a life-threatening coma after a massive stroke, publisher Susan McGrath must decide how to handle the absence of the Granite Creek Gazette’s most popular columnist. Haze, aka the “radical hag ,” started writing her observations about life in the quintessential Minnesota town 50 years ago, so with such a trove of archived material to choose from, Susan decides to run highlights from Haze’s long, illustrious, and sometimes controversial career. Sam, Susan’s 14-year-old son, is looking for a part-time job. While working for his mom at the paper is not his first choice, he quickly discovers the joys of small-town journalism when he is tasked with choosing vintage columns (including recipes ) by Haze suitable for reprinting, accompanied by letters from loyal readers.
The Cheffe: A Cook’s Novel by Marie NDiaye
Lauded French-Senegalese author NDiaye introduces the otherwise-unnamed “Cheffe ,” a woman so consumed with creating unique culinary delicacies that this desire overrules everything else in her life. Her story is told by an unnamed narrator, a former student and admirer who has an obsession of his own: single-minded dedication to recounting the Cheffe’s story along with his own interpretations. As the novel progresses, readers learn that although the Cheffe enjoys some aspects of the fame that her culinary prowess affords her, she is stubbornly secretive about the rest of her life. When she becomes pregnant and must choose between her work and her baby, she ultimately decides to leave the child to her family, and focus on opening a restaurant: a choice that comes back to haunt her in the future in ways that readers won’t have predicted.
The Cook by Maylis de Kerangal
Mauro, 20, is observed on a train headed for culinary school in Berlin. Distracted by the city’s nightlife, he is reminded of his goals when he accidentally brushes against his textbook. Over the next 15 years, Mauro is consumed by his work in a variety of kitchens in Berlin, Paris, and Asia, including the one in his own restaurant, while he also manages the normal ups-and-downs of everyday life and confronts his past. An unnamed friend with a limited point of view is the story’s narrator and shares information without judgment, making the reader feel equally intimate with both storyteller and protagonist.
Natalie Tan’s Book of Luck and Fortune by Roselle Lim
When chef Natalie’s mother passes away, she hasn’t been back to San Francisco in years, but the responsibility for settling her mother’s affairs falls squarely on her shoulders. Natalie wants to thank the neighbors that checked in on her mother, who developed agoraphobia in her later years, and soon discovers that the neighborhood has changed since she’s been away. Swaths of Chinatown have fallen into disrepair without a steady stream of foodies and tourists to drive the economy. When Natalie falls into an opportunity to bring some life back to the neighborhood, it promises to be the hardest and most rewarding risk she’s ever taken.
Supper Club by Lara Williams
When Roberta’s best friend and roommate Stevie suggests they parlay Roberta’s considerable cooking talents to hosting women-only dinner parties, it just makes sense: “what could violate social convention more than women coming together to indulge their hunger and take up space?” They dumpster-dive for ingredients, rent out a shuttered restaurant, and let the orgiastic meals unfold. Word-of-mouth spreads, their ranks grow, the drugs flow, and the venues get less legal. The wild, late-night feasts punctuate Roberta’s self-reckoning on the precipice of 30, as she recalls being both acutely and profoundly victimized by men during her college years. When a friend from back then becomes her first real boyfriend, Roberta is caught between two free-for-alls—love and marriage with Adnan, female liberation forever with Stevie—and is feeling anything but free.
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
Ellmann tells a tale of two mothers. One is a magnificent mountain lion whose brief, increasingly dramatic appearances are rendered in lyrical sentences and paragraphs that surface intermittently like stepping-stones within a deluge of consciousness conveying the tumbling thoughts of a forty-something human mother of four in Ohio. Her Niagara of memories, worries, observations, and self-criticisms surge across the novel’s many pages in one audaciously long sentence, achieving an incantatory cadence based on the refrain “the fact that” (“the fact that I seem to fall in love during family crises, first Chuck, then Leo, the fact that Frank doesn’t count, the fact that I tried to love him”). Ellmann’s smart, hilarious, high-strung narrator—a former history teacher, a caterer specializing in pies, and a cancer survivor—ruminates over food, family, extinction, the Native American genocide, nuclear waste, movies, Laura Ingalls Wilder, school shootings, racism, Trump, plastic-filled oceans, and polluted rivers. She adores her engineer husband and mourns for her mother, to whom the title obliquely refers. As the mountain lion’s natural idyll is destroyed, forcing her on a desperate odyssey, her human counterpoint and her children also come under siege.
(reviews provided by Booklist)
~posted by Kara P.
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