Certain to delight lovers of historical fiction and TV cooking competitions.
Stir together estranged sisters, prisoners of war, dastardly men, and whale-meat pie recipes; leave to simmer.
It's 1942, and England’s women have been given a directive straight from Winston Churchill himself: Keep a stiff upper lip and do your part in your kitchen for the war effort. At the forefront of this messaging is a BBC radio show—hosted by a man, Ambrose Hart—that teaches Britain’s housewives how to make a lot out of very little. The BBC decides the show would better reach its intended audience if it were co-hosted by a woman; to find this feminine voice it holds a three-part cooking competition whose prize is the coveted radio spot. Enter Audrey, a war-widowed mother of three with a scrappy bakery business; Gwendoline, Audrey’s haughty sister, who's married to a bigwig factory owner; Nell, a meek but talented kitchen maid; and Zelda, an elite London chef with a secret. The book is divided into the three-part structure of the cooking competition, and while the novel is somewhat slow to start, Ryan hits her stride during “Main Course.” As a bonus for history buffs, many chapters end with ration-conscious recipes ranging from the eccentric (sheep’s head wrapped in its own tongue) to the more mundane (apple cake sweetened with honey instead of the hard-to-come-by sugar). Replete with a hearty amount of melodrama —“My own butler saw you with that fancy chef....Do you want to make a fool of me? Do you?”—and more than a dash of that wartime staple, saccharine—“You’ll be surprised what the power of friendship can do”—this is nonetheless a creative and satiating novel.
Certain to delight lovers of historical fiction and TV cooking competitions.Pub Date: Feb. 23, 2021
ISBN: 978-0-593-15880-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Nov. 26, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A masterpiece.
Two young Indian writers discover their conjoined destinies by leaving home, coming back, connecting, disconnecting, and swimming in the ocean at Goa.
Sonia’s grandfather, the lawyer, and his friend, the Colonel, are connected by a weekly chess game and a local tradition of families sharing food, “paraded through the neighborhood in tiffin carriers, in thermos flasks, upon plates covered in napkins tied in rabbit ears.” Shortly after Desai’s magnificent third novel opens, the two families are also connected by a marriage proposal. Upon hearing that Sonia is feeling lonely at college in Vermont—loneliness? Is there anything more un-Indian?—and unaware that she is romantically involved with a famous, much older painter, her elders deliver a hilariously lukewarm letter proposing that she be introduced to Sonny, the Colonel’s grandson. Sonny is living in New York working as a copy editor at The Associated Press, and he, too, has a partner no one knows about. Sonny’s family feels they are being asked to give up their son to balance out some long-ago bad investment advice from the Colonel; on the other hand, they would very much like to get the other family’s kebab recipe. The fate of this half-hearted setup unfurls over many years and almost 700 delicious pages that the author has apparently been working on since the publication of The Inheritance of Loss (2006), which won the Booker Prize and National Book Critics Circle Award. You can almost feel the decades passing as the novel becomes increasingly concerned with the process of novel-writing; toward the end, Sonia can’t stop thinking about whether, if she writes all the stories she knows, “these stories [would] intersect and make a book? How would they hold together?” Desai’s trust in her own process pays off, as vignettes of just a page or two (Sonia’s head-spinning tour of a museum with the great artist; Sonny’s lightning-strike theory that only people who have cleaned their own toilet can appreciate reading novels) intersect with the novel’s central obsessions—love, family, writing, the role of the U.S. in the Indian imagination, the dangers faced by a woman on her own—and come to a perfectly satisfying close.
A masterpiece.Pub Date: Sept. 23, 2025
ISBN: 9780307700155
Page Count: 704
Publisher: Hogarth
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
An emotionally acute study of manliness.
Scenes from the life of a well-off but emotionally damaged man.
Szalay’s sixth novel is a study of István, who as a 15-year-old in Hungary is lured into a sexual relationship with a married neighbor; when he has a confrontation with the woman’s husband, the man falls down the stairs and dies. Add in stints in a juvenile facility and as a soldier in Iraq, and István enters his 20s almost completely stunted emotionally. (Saying much besides “Okay” sometimes seems utterly beyond him.) Fueled by id, libido, and street drugs, he seems destined to be a casualty until, while working as a bouncer at a London strip club, he helps rescue the owner of a security firm who’s been assaulted; soon, he’s hired as the driver for a tycoon and his wife, with whom he begins an affair. István is a fascinating character in a kind of negative sense—he’s intriguing for all the ways he fails to confront his trauma, all the missed opportunities to find deeper connections. To that end, Szalay’s prose is emotionally bare, deliberately clipped and declarative, evoking István’s unwillingness (or incapacity) to look inside himself; he occasionally consults with a therapist, but a relentless passivity keeps him from opening up much. His capacity to fail upwards eventually catches up with him, and the novel becomes a more standard story about betrayal and inheritances, but it also turns on small but meaningful moments of heroism that suggest a deeper character than somebody who, as someone suggests, “exemplif[ies] a primitive form of masculinity.” István’s relentlessly stony approach to existence grates at times—there are a few too many “okay”s in the dialogue—but Szalay’s distanced approach has its payoffs. Being closed off, like István, doesn’t close off the world, and at times has tragic consequences.
An emotionally acute study of manliness.Pub Date: April 1, 2025
ISBN: 9781982122799
Page Count: 368
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: March 22, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2025
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
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