"You’ll eat up every word of this spicy historical novel." —Real Simple Auguste Escoffier (1846–1935) was the renowned French chef and restaurateur who gave birth to the way we eat today. The heart of Escoffier’s story, however, lies in his love for two very different women: the beautiful, reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the poet Delphine Daffis. This lushly imagined novel transports us into Escoffier’s private world, weaving a sensual tale of food and longing, war and romance.
A reimagining of the world of the remarkable French chef Auguste Escoffier. A man of contradictions, food-obsessed yet rarely hungry, Escoffier was also torn between two women: the famous, beautiful, and reckless actress Sarah Bernhardt and his wife, the independent and sublime poet Delphine Daffis, who refused ever to leave Monte Carlo. A novel of the sensuality of food and love amid a world on the verge of war.
“The ultimate truffle true crime tale”*: A thrilling journey through the hidden underworld of the world's most prized luxury ingredient. *Bianca Bosker, New York Times bestselling author of Cork Dork Beneath the gloss of star chefs and crystal-laden tables, the truffle supply chain is touched by theft, secrecy, sabotage, and fraud. Farmers patrol their fields with rifles and fear losing trade secrets to spies. Hunters plant poisoned meatballs to eliminate rival truffle-hunting dogs. Naive buyers and even knowledgeable experts are duped by liars and counterfeits. Deeply reported and elegantly written, this page-turning exposé documents the dark, sometimes deadly crimes at each level of the truffle’s path from ground to plate, making sense of an industry that traffics in scarcity, seduction, and cash. Through it all, a question lingers: What, other than money, draws people to these dirt-covered jewels? Praise for The Truffle Underground “Investigative journalist and first-time author Jacobs does a remarkable job reporting from the front lines of the truffle industry, bringing to vivid life French black-truffle farmers, Italian white-truffle foragers, and their marvelously well-trained dogs.”—Booklist (starred review) “In The Truffle Underground, Ryan Jacobs presents a lively exposé of the truffle industry, reporting on the crimes that ‘haunt the whole supply chain.’ . . . Even if truffles are beyond your pay grade, there is plenty of enjoyment to be had in the sheer devilment portrayed in this informative and appetizing book.”—The Wall Street Journal “You’ll never look at truffle fries the same way after reading this book. . . . You can practically smell the soil as you follow truffle farmers and bandits through the groves and fields of France and Italy where the fungi are harvested and stolen.”—Outside, “Five Favorite Summer Reads” “[The] book is a rigorously reported, carefully written, endlessly interesting immersion in a high-stakes subculture.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Jacobs takes us on an eye-opening journey through the prized mushroom’s supply chain and the global black market for these tubers in this tale of theft, deceit, and high-stakes secrets.”—Real Simple
"Steeped in the tradition of the Indian epic, yet modern and vastly entertaining." —The Times (London) In her fiction debut, Alice Albinia weaves a multithreaded epic tale that encompasses divine saga and familial discord and introduces an unforgettable heroine. Leela—alluring, taciturn, haunted—is moving from New York back to Delhi. Worldly and accomplished, she has been in self-imposed exile from India and her family for decades; twenty-two years earlier, her sister was seduced by the egotistical Vyasa, and the fallout from their relationship drove Leela away. Now an eminent Sanskrit scholar, Vyasa is preparing for his son’s marriage. But when Leela arrives for the wedding, she disrupts the careful choreography of the weekend, with its myriad attendees and their conflicting desires. Gleefully presiding over the drama is Ganesh—divine, elephant-headed scribe of the Mahabharata, India’s great epic. The family may think they have arranged the wedding for their own selfish ends, but according to Ganesh it is he who is directing events—in a bid to save Leela, his beloved heroine, from Vyasa. As the weekend progresses, secret online personas, maternal identities, and poetic authorships are all revealed; boundaries both religious and continental are crossed; and families are ripped apart and brought back together in this vibrant and brilliant celebration of family, love, and storytelling.
An enthralling novel about love, loss, secrets, friendship, and the healing power of literature, by the bestselling author of The Knitting Circle. Ava’s twenty-five-year marriage has fallen apart, and her two grown children are pursuing their own lives outside of the country. Ava joins a book group, not only for her love of reading but also out of sheer desperation for companionship. The group’s goal throughout the year is for each member to present the book that matters most to them. Ava rediscovers a mysterious book from her childhood—one that helped her through the traumas of the untimely deaths of her sister and mother. Alternating with Ava’s story is that of her troubled daughter Maggie, who, living in Paris, descends into a destructive relationship with an older man. Ava’s mission to find that book and its enigmatic author takes her on a quest that unravels the secrets of her past and offers her and Maggie the chance to remake their lives.
Now available in paperback -- "To read Kelby's novel is, in its own words, to 'fall into a dream, a flying dream.' To paraphrase and summarize such fine spun fiction must inevitably be as inadequate as any attempt to retell your most amazing dream the morning after." --New York Times Book Review Scented by chocolate and haunted by war, this compelling novel of dark miracles and angelic visitations offers up a distinctly imaginative new voice in fiction. Marie Claire is a young French Jew in a Nazi-occupied Belgian town, cared for by her grandmother, who cultivates flowers. A shattering of glass, and Marie Claire's village is in rubble. Her grandmother is dead, everyone is dead. She flees to the root cellar of her grandmother's house and waits . . .
“An absorbing, generous, ravishing book by a high priestess of you-have-to-read-this prose." —Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild Pam Houston, an "early master of the art of rendering fiercely independent, brilliant women in love with the wrong men" (Sarah Norris, Barnes & Noble Review), delivers a novel that whisks us from one breathtaking precipice to the next. Along the way, we unravel the story of Pam (a character not unlike the author), a fearless traveler aiming to leave her metaphorical baggage behind as she seeks a comfort zone in the air. With the help of a loyal cast of friends, body workers, and a new partner who helps her to be at home, she finally finds something like ground under her feet.
A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year "Note-perfect. Heartbreaking. Profound…[A] polished dagger of a novel that will cut out your heart." —Charles Bock, New York Times best-selling author of Beautiful Children Robert, an Oakland cop, still can’t let go of Suzy, the mysterious Vietnamese wife who left him. Now she’s disappeared from her new husband, Sonny, a violent smuggler who blackmails Robert into finding her. Searching for Suzy in the sleek and seamy gambling dens of Las Vegas, Robert finds himself also chasing the past that haunts her—one that extends back to Vietnam and a refugee camp in Malaysia, and forward to Suzy’s estranged daughter, a poker shark now taking the future into her own hands.
One of The Atlantic's Great American Novels Winner of the 2016 International Dublin Literary Award "Gorgeously tender at its core…beautiful, heartstopping…Family Life really blazes." —Sonali Deraniyagala, New York Times Book Review Hailed as a "supreme storyteller" (Philadelphia Inquirer) for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma is possessed of a narrative voice "as hypnotic as those found in the pages of Dostoyevsky" (The Nation). In his highly anticipated second novel, Family Life, he delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision. We meet the Mishra family in Delhi in 1978, where eight-year-old Ajay and his older brother Birju play cricket in the streets, waiting for the day when their plane tickets will arrive and they and their mother can fly across the world and join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more: when automatic glass doors open before them, they feel that surely they must have been mistaken for somebody important. Pressing an elevator button and the elevator closing its doors and rising, they have a feeling of power at the fact that the elevator is obeying them. Life is extraordinary until tragedy strikes, leaving one brother severely brain-damaged and the other lost and virtually orphaned in a strange land. Ajay, the family’s younger son, prays to a God he envisions as Superman, longing to find his place amid the ruins of his family’s new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival.
A mythical family saga steeped in the legends of the sea, The Lobster Kings is a "powerhouse of a novel" (Ben Fountain). The Kings family has lived on Loosewood Island for three hundred years. Now, Woody Kings, the leader of the island's lobster fishing community and the family patriarch, teeters on the throne, and Cordelia, the oldest of Woody's three daughters, stands to inherit the crown. To do so, however, she must defend her island from meth dealers from the mainland, while navigating sibling rivalry and the vulnerable nature of her own heart when she falls in love with her sternman.
