food in fiction

Gold Medal, Contemporary Fiction, New York City Book Awards
After two heartbreaking losses, Luna wants adventure. Something and somewhere very different from the affluent, sheltered home where she grew up. An adventure in which she can make some difference.

Lucien, a worldly, well-traveled young architect, finds a stranger’s journal at a café. He has qualms and pangs of guilt about reading it. But they don’t stop him. His decision to go on reading changes his life.

Months later, they meet at a bookstore. Fascinated by his stories and adventurous spirit, Luna goes to a rice-growing village in a country steeped in an ancient culture and a deadly history. What she finds there defies anything she could have imagined. Will she leave this world unscathed?

An epistolary tale of courage, resilience, and the bonds that bring diverse people together.

Cooking a great meal is an art. An act of love. An act of grace. A life-affirming gift. These are lessons Gina learns from her mother, daughter of a French chef.

Born to poor parents; Gina thinks of herself as a nobody who gets lucky when she’s chosen to cook at a Michelin-starred restaurant in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this world of new challenges, and fascinating people gripped by dark motives, she finds unexpected danger.

With only her passion for cooking and the lessons she learned from her mother, can Gina survive and thrive in this other world of privilege, pleasure and menace?

A passion for music. Shattered dreams. A second chance. Such was Agnieszka's past life, but to Justin and Elise, she is only a mother who plays piano exceptionally well. Her oldest son's suicide attempt forces her to reveal a past of heartache , betrayal, and a deep but tragic first love. Will she regret baring her soul to her children and threaten her relationship with her husband?

Eugene O'Neill says: Life is for each man a solitary cell whose walls are mirrors.

Five people as different from each other as you and those around you in a crowd. Five lives that never touch each other. Because they are scattered from Pais to Honolulu. Because all are solitary souls.

But would they feel kinship for each other if they were to meet? Because they are all solitary souls? Would we feel kinship with them? Because in our brief encounters with solitary souls , we realize how alone we all are at moments that matter the most.