LONGLIST
LONGLIST
The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction’s longlist includes 15 authors from the United States and Canada, spanning novels, short story collections, and fiction in translation. On May 13, one of these writers will win the $150,000 USD grand prize, generously presented by BMO Financial Group.
Longlist selections were chosen by a Jury of esteemed writers including
Jen Sookfong Lee (Jury Chair), Laila Lalami, Claire Messud, Dolen Perkins-Valdez, and Eden Robinson.
In addition to the grand prize, the winner will receive a residency at Fogo Island Inn, and each of the four finalists will receive $12,500 USD. The 5 shortlisted titles will be announced on April 9 and the winner on May 13.
The awards for the The Carol Shields Prize for Fiction are generously provided by BMO Financial Group.
Lisa Alward
Cocktail: Stories (Biblioasis)
Eleanor Catton
Birnam Wood: A Novel (McClelland & Stewart)
Nicole Cuffy
Dances: A Novel (One World)
Claudia Dey
Daughter: A Novel (Doubleday Canada)
Kim Coleman Foote
Coleman Hill (SJP Lit)
V. V. Ganeshananthan
Brotherless Night (Random House)
Aisha Abdel Gawad
Between Two Moons (Doubleday)
Tania James
Loot: A Novel (Alfred A. Knopf)
Juliana Lamy
You Were Watching from the Sand: Short Stories (Red Hen Press)
Catherine Leroux
The Future, translated by Susan Ouriou (Biblioasis)
Rebecca Makkai
I Have Some Questions for You: A Novel (Viking)
Janika Oza
A History of Burning: A Novel (McClelland & Stewart)
Mona Susan Power
A Council of Dolls: A Novel (Mariner Books)
Anuja Varghese
Chrysalis: Stories (House of Anansi)
C Pam Zhang
Land of Milk and Honey: A Novel (Riverhead Books)
Meet the 2024 Nominees
“With a coolly dispassionate voice, Alward views the small horrors of domesticity, […] and turns them into stories whose implications reverberate far beyond the walls of any home.” —Kirkus Reviews
A girl receives a bedtime visit from a drunken party guest, who will haunt her fantasies for years. A young mother discovers underneath the wallpaper a striking portrait that awakens inconvenient desires. A divorced man distracts himself from the mess he’s made by flirting with a stranger. These intimate, immersive stories explore life’s watershed moments, in which seemingly insignificant details—a pot of hyacinths, a freshly painted yellow wall—and the most chance of encounters come to exert a tidal pull. Set in the swinging sixties and each decade since, Cocktail reveals the schism between the lives we build up around us and our deepest hidden selves.
Lisa Alward’s short fiction has appeared in The Journey Prize and twice in Best Canadian Stories. She has won the Fiddlehead Prize as well as the Peter Hinchcliffe Fiction Award, has been a finalist for The Malahat Review’s Open Season Award, an honourable mention in the Peter Hinchcliffe Award, and been featured on numerous other long lists, including for the CBC Story Prize and Prism International’s Jacob Zilber Prize (three times). She was born and grew up in Halifax and completed an English degree at the University of Toronto and an MA at Queen Mary College in London, England. In the eighties and early nineties, she worked in book publishing in Toronto, before moving with her young family to Vancouver and ultimately to Fredericton, New Brunswick, where at 50 she began to write stories. Cocktail (Biblioasis), which received a starred review in Kirkus Reviews, is her debut collection.
“Birnam Wood is terrific. As a multilayered, character-driven thriller, it’s as good as it gets. Ruth Rendell would have loved it. A beautifully textured work—what a treat.” —Stephen King
Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand’s South Island, cutting off the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster has created an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.
For years, the group has struggled to break even. Then Mira, Birnam Wood’s founder, stumbles on an answer: occupying the farm at Thorndike would mean a shot at solvency at last. But Mira is not the only one interested in Thorndike. The enigmatic American billionaire Robert Lemoine has snatched it up to build his end-times bunker, or so he tells Mira when he catches her on the property. Intrigued by Mira and Birnam Wood, he makes them an offer that would set them up for the long term. But can they trust him? And, as their ideals and ideologies are tested, can they trust one another?
Birnam Wood is Shakespearean in its drama, Austenian in its wit, and, like both influences, fascinated by what makes us who we are. It is an unflinching look at the surprising consequences of even our most well-intended actions, and an enthralling consideration of the human impulse to ensure our own survival.
Eleanor Catton is the author of the international bestsellers Birnam Wood, which was shortlisted for the Scotiabank Giller Prize, the Kirkus Prize, the Orwell Prize, and the Ockham Book Award, and The Luminaries, winner of the Man Booker Prize and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction. Her debut novel, The Rehearsal, won the Amazon.ca First Novel Award, the Betty Trask Prize, and the NZ Society of Authors’ Best First Book Award. Catton was named one of Granta’s Best Young British Novelists in 2023. As a screenwriter, she adapted The Luminaries for television, and Jane Austen’s Emma for feature film. Born in London, Ontario, and raised in New Zealand, she now lives in Cambridge, England.
“A ballerina at the height of her powers becomes consumed with finding her missing brother in this ‘striking debut.'” —Oprah Daily
At twenty-two years old, Cece Cordell reaches the pinnacle of her career as a ballet dancer when she’s promoted to principal at the New York City Ballet. She’s instantly catapulted into celebrity, heralded for her “inspirational” role as the first Black ballerina in the famed company’s history. Even as she celebrates the achievement of a lifelong dream, Cece remains haunted by the feeling that she doesn’t belong. As she waits for some feeling of rightness that doesn’t arrive, she begins to unravel the loose threads of her past—an absent father, a pragmatic mother who dismisses Cece’s ambitions, and a missing older brother who stoked her childhood love of ballet but disappeared to deal with his own demons.
Soon after her promotion, Cece is faced with a choice that has the potential to derail her career and shatter the life she’s cultivated for herself, sending her on a pilgrimage to both find her brother and reclaim the parts of herself lost in the grinding machinery of the traditional ballet world.
Written with spellbinding beauty and ballet’s precise structure, Dances centers around women, art, and power, and how we come to define freedom for ourselves.
Nicole Cuffy is a proud Brooklyn emigrant living in DC. She holds a BA in Writing from Columbia University, and an MFA in Fiction from the New School. She does her best writing when she’s writing by hand, and she is a high-functioning book addict. Her work can be found in Chautauqua, The Masters Review Volume VI, Blue Mesa Review, and the New England Review, and her chapbook, “Atlas of the Body,” was an editor's choice and finalist for the Black River Chapbook Competition, and winner of the Chautauqua Janus Prize. Her novel, Dances, was released in May 2023 through One World Random House.
“[A] darkly glittering tale. We are inside a howl.” —The New York Times
To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.
So says Mona Dean—playwright, actress and daughter to a man famous for one great novel, and in fruitless pursuit of the next, whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half-sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a cold, cruel stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and fledgling artist, he begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights—painfully, parasitically—in his attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.
Mona’s tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss—one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements—can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.
Claudia Dey’s most recent novel, Daughter, was an instant national bestseller, named a New York Times Fall Fiction pick, an Elle Magazine Book of the Year, and a Globe and Mail Best Book. She is also the author of Heartbreaker, a Northern Lit and Trillium Book Award finalist, currently being adapted for television. Her plays have been produced internationally, and nominated for the Governor General’s, Dora and Trillium Book Awards. Dey has worked as a film actress, a guest artist at the National Theatre School, and an adjunct professor at the University of Toronto. Her fiction, interviews, and essays have appeared in The Paris Review ("Mothers As Makers of Death"), McSweeney’s, Lit Hub, Vogue, Hazlitt, The Believer, and elsewhere.
“Once in a while, a writer comes along with a brilliance that stops the breath. Kim Coleman Foote is that writer.” —Jacqueline Woodson, National Book Award-winning author Red at the Bone
In 1916, during the early days of the Great Migration, Celia Coleman and Lucy Grimes flee the racism and poverty of their homes in the post–Civil War South for the “Promised Land” of Vauxhall, New Jersey. But the North possesses its own challenges and bigotries that will shape the fates of the women and their families over the next seventy years. Told through the voices of nine family members—their perspectives at once harmonious and contradictory—Coleman Hill is a penetrating multigenerational debut.
Within ten years of arriving in Vauxhall, both Celia and Lucy’s husbands are dead, and they turn to one another for support in raising their children far from home. Lucy’s gentleness sets Celia at ease, and Celia lends Lucy her fire when her friend wants to cower. Encouraged by their mothers’ friendship, their children’s lives become enmeshed as well. As the children grow into adolescence, two are caught in an impulsive act of impropriety, and Celia and Lucy find themselves at irreconcilable odds over who’s to blame. The ensuing fallout has dire consequences that reverberate through the next two generations of their families.
A stunning biomythography—a word coined by the late great writer Audre Lorde—Coleman Hill draws from the author’s own family legend, historical record, and fervent imagination to create an unforgettable new history. The result is a kaleidoscopic novel whose intergenerational arc emerges through a series of miniatures that contain worlds.
Kim Coleman Foote was born and raised in New Jersey, where she started writing fiction at the age of seven(ish). A recent fellow at the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, she has received additional fellowships from the NEA, NYFA, Bread Loaf, Phillips Exeter Academy, Center for Fiction, and Fulbright, and residencies at Yaddo, MacDowell, and Hedgebrook, among others. Her fiction and essays have appeared in The Best American Short Stories 2022, The Rumpus, Prairie Schooner, the Missouri Review, The Literary Review, Kweli, and Obsidian. Coleman Hill is her first book.
“A beautifully written story of resilience, loss, human connection and survival amidst the complexities and violence of war.” —Ms Magazine
Jaffna, 1981. Sixteen-year-old Sashi wants to become a doctor. But over the next decade, a vicious civil war tears through her home, and her dream spins off course as she sees her four beloved brothers and their friend K swept up in the mounting violence. Desperate to act, Sashi accepts K’s invitation to work as a medic at a field hospital for the militant Tamil Tigers, who, following years of state discrimination and violence, are fighting for a separate homeland for Sri Lanka’s Tamil minority. But after the Tigers murder one of her teachers and Indian peacekeepers arrive only to commit further atrocities, Sashi begins to question where she stands. When one of her medical school professors, a Tamil feminist and dissident, invites her to join a secret project documenting human rights violations, she embarks on a dangerous path that will change her forever.
Set during the early years of Sri Lanka’s three-decade civil war, Brotherless Night is a heartrending portrait of one woman’s moral journey and a testament to both the enduring impact of war and the bonds of home.
V. V. Ganeshananthan is the author of the novels Brotherless Night (a New York Times Editors’ Choice) and Love Marriage, which was longlisted for the Women's Prize and named one of the best books of the year by The Washington Post. Her work has appeared in Granta, The New York Times, and The Best American Nonrequired Reading, among others. A former vice president of the South Asian Journalists Association, she has also served on the board of the Asian American Writers’ Workshop, and is presently a member of the boards of the American Institute for Sri Lankan Studies and the Minnesota Prison Writing Workshop. She teaches in the MFA program at the University of Minnesota and co-hosts the Fiction/Non/Fiction podcast on Literary Hub, which is about the intersection of literature and the news.
“A vibrant achievement.” —Kirkus Reviews
It’s the holy month of Ramadan, and twin sisters Amira and Lina are about to graduate high school in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. On the precipice of adulthood, they plan to embark on a summer of teenage revelry, trying on new identities and testing the limits of what they can get away with while still under their parents’ roof. But the twins’ expectations of a summer of freedom collide with their older brother’s return from prison, whose mysterious behavior threatens to undo the delicate family balance.
Meanwhile, outside the family’s apartment, a storm is brewing in Bay Ridge. A raid on a local business sparks a protest that brings the Arab community together, and a senseless act of violence threatens to tear them apart. Everyone’s motives are called into question as an alarming sense of disquiet pervades the neighborhood. With everything spiraling out of control, how will Amira and Lina know who they can trust?
A gorgeously written, intimate family story and a polyphonic portrait of life under the specter of Islamophobia, Between Two Moons challenges the reader to interrogate their own assumptions, asking questions of allegiance to faith, family, and community, and what it means to be a young Muslim in America.
Aisha Abdel Gawad has been published in The Kenyon Review, American Short Fiction, and the scholarly journal The Muslim World in a special issue on Anglophone Muslim women writers. She won a 2015 Pushcart Prize for her short story "Waking Luna." After graduating college, Aisha worked at the Arab American Association of New York, a community center and social services agency serving the immigrant community in Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. She is currently a high school English teacher in Connecticut.
“Through transporting prose, and with wit and charm, Loot asks who gets written out of history and why.” —The Guardian
Abbas is just seventeen years old when his gifts as a woodcarver come to the attention of Tipu Sultan, and he is drawn into service at the palace in order to build a giant tiger automaton for Tipu’s sons, a gift to commemorate their return from British captivity. His fate—and the fate of the wooden tiger he helps create—will mirror the vicissitudes of nations and dynasties ravaged by war across India and Europe.
Working alongside the legendary French clockmaker Lucien du Leze, Abbas hones his craft, learns French, and meets Jehanne, the daughter of a French expatriate. When Du Leze is finally permitted to return home to Rouen, he invites Abbas to come along as his apprentice. But by the time Abbas travels to Europe, Tipu’s palace has been looted by British forces, and the tiger automaton has disappeared. To prove himself, Abbas must retrieve the tiger from an estate in the English countryside, where it is displayed in a collection of plundered art.
Tania James is the author of the novels Loot, The Tusk That Did the Damage and Atlas of Unknowns and the short story collection Aerogrammes. Her fiction has appeared in Boston Review, Granta, Guernica, One Story, A Public Space, and The Kenyon Review. She lives in Washington, D.C.
“Every sentence Juliana Lamy writes is like a match being struck. Not many authors debut with her clarity of vision, inventiveness, and verbal agility, and I would wager almost anything that You Were Watching from the Sand will mark only the first chapter in an important body of work.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of The Ghost Variations: One Hundred Stories
A stylistically and conceptually daring collection that winds from fantastical horror to mischievous domestic realism and always keeps in its sharp, compassionate view the material, spiritual, and emotional lives of Haitian people.
Playful, kinetic, and devastating in turn, You Were Watching from the Sand is a collection in which Haitian men, women, and children who find their lives cleaved by the interminably strange bite back at the bizarre with their own oddities. In “belly,” a young woman abandoned by her only living relative makes a person from the mud beside her backyard creek. In “We Feel it in Punta Cana,” a domestic child servant in the Dominican Republic tours through his own lush imagination to make his material conditions more bearable. In “The Oldest Sensation is Anger,” a teenager invites a same-aged family friend into her apartment and uncovers a spate of disturbing secrets about her. Written in a mixture of high lyricism, absurdist comedy, and Haitian cultural witticisms, this is a collection whose dynamism matches that of its characters at every beat and turn.
Juliana Lamy is a Haitian fiction writer with a bachelor’s degree in history and literature from Harvard College. In 2018, she won Harvard’s Le Baron Russell Briggs Undergraduate Fiction Prize. She received her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives in South Florida, where she was raised after immigrating from Haiti.
“The novel contends with histories of forced migration, poverty, and environmental degradation … [and] speak[s] more broadly to the ways cities will be forced to change in the face of climate change.” —NPR
In an alternate history of Detroit, the Motor City was never surrendered to the U.S. Its residents deal with pollution, poverty, and the legacy of racism—and strange and magical things are happening: children rule over their own kingdom in the trees and burned houses regenerate themselves. When Gloria arrives looking for answers and her missing granddaughters, at first she finds only a hungry mouse in the derelict home where her daughter was murdered. But the neighbours take pity on her and she turns to their resilience and impressive gardens for sustenance.
When a strange intuition sends Gloria into the woods of Parc Rouge, where the city’s orphaned and abandoned children are rumored to have created their own society, she can’t imagine the strength she will find. A richly imagined story of community and a plea for persistence in the face of our uncertain future, The Future is a lyrical testament to the power we hold to protect the people and places we love—together.
Catherine Leroux is a Québec novelist, translator and editor born in 1979. Her novel Le mur mitoyen won the France-Quebec Prize and its English version, The Party Wall, was nominated for the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize. The Future is the CBC Canada Reads 2024 winner. It has also received the Jacques-Brossard award for speculative fiction and was nominated for the Quebec Booksellers Prize. Catherine also won the 2019 Governor General's Literary Award for her translation of Do Not Say We Have Nothing by Madeleine Thien. Two of her novels are currently being adapted for the screen. She lives in Montreal with her two children.
Translated from French by Susan Ouriou.
Susan Ouriou is an award-winning fiction writer and literary translator with over sixty translations and co-translations of fiction, non-fiction, children’s and young-adult literature to her credit. She has won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Translation for which she has also been shortlisted on five other occasions. Many of her young adult translations have made the IBBY Honor List. She has also published two novels, Damselfish and Nathan, edited the anthologies Beyond Words – Translating the World and Languages of Our Land – Indigenous Poems and Stories from Quebec and contributed a one-act play to the upcoming anthology Many Mothers – Seven Skies. Susan lives in Calgary, Alberta.
“[An] irresistible literary page-turner.” —The Boston Globe
A successful film professor and podcaster, Bodie Kane is content to forget her past—the family tragedy that marred her adolescence, her four largely miserable years at a New Hampshire boarding school, and the murder of her former roommate, Thalia Keith, in the spring of their senior year. Though the circumstances surrounding Thalia’s death and the conviction of the school’s athletic trainer, Omar Evans, are hotly debated online, Bodie prefers—needs—to let sleeping dogs lie.
But when the Granby School invites her back to teach a course, Bodie is inexorably drawn to the case and its increasingly apparent flaws. In their rush to convict Omar, did the school and the police overlook other suspects? Is the real killer still out there? As she falls down the very rabbit hole she was so determined to avoid, Bodie begins to wonder if she wasn’t as much of an outsider at Granby as she’d thought—if, perhaps, back in 1995, she knew something that might have held the key to solving the case.
In I Have Some Questions for You, award-winning author Rebecca Makkai has crafted her most irresistible novel yet: a stirring investigation into collective memory and a deeply felt examination of one woman’s reckoning with her past, with a transfixing mystery at its heart. Timely, hypnotic, and populated with a cast of unforgettable characters, I Have Some Questions for You is at once a compulsive page-turner and a literary triumph.
Rebecca Makkai’s last novel, The Great Believers, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award; it was the winner of the ALA Carnegie Medal, the Stonewall Book Award, the Clark Prize, and the LA Times Book Prize; and it was one of the New York Times' Ten Best Books of 2018. Her other books are the novels I Have Some Questions for You, The Borrower and The Hundred-Year House, and the collection Music for Wartime—four stories from which appeared in The Best American Short Stories. A 2022 Guggenheim Fellow, Rebecca is on the MFA faculties of the University of Nevada, Reno at Lake Tahoe and Northwestern University, and is Artistic Director of StoryStudio Chicago.
“Remarkable. . . . A haunting, symphonic tale that speaks to the nuanced complexities of class and trauma.” —The New York Times
India, 1898. Pirbhai is the thirteen-year-old breadwinner for his family when he steps into a dhow on the promise of work, only to be taken across the ocean to labour on the East African Railway for the British. With no money or voice but a strong will to survive, he makes an impossible choice that will haunt him for the rest of his days and reverberate across generations.
Pirbhai’s children go on to thrive in Uganda during the waning days of British colonial rule. As the country moves towards independence and military dictatorship, Pirbhai’s granddaughters—sisters Latika, Mayuri, and Kiya—come of age in a divided nation, each forging her own path for the future. Latika is an aspiring journalist with a fierce determination to fight for what she believes in. Mayuri’s ambitions will take her farther away from her family than she ever imagined. And fearless Kiya will have to bear the weight of their secrets.
Forced to flee Uganda during Idi Amin’s brutal expulsion of South Asians in 1972, the family must start their lives over again in Toronto. Then one day news arrives that makes each generation question how far they are willing to go, and who they are willing to defy, to secure a place of their own in the world.
A masterful and breathtakingly intimate saga of colonialism and exile, complicity and resistance, A History of Burning is a radiant debut about the stories our families choose to share—and those that remain unspoken.
Janika Oza is the author of the novel A History of Burning, winner of the 2024 Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature, a finalist for the 2023 Governor General's Award for Fiction, and a New York Times Editor’s Choice. She is the winner of a 2022 O. Henry Award and the 2020 Kenyon Review Short Fiction Award. She lives in Toronto.
“Power’s deep knowledge of Indigenous history comes through in keen depictions of the Indian schools, and she illuminates the characters’ struggles with generation trauma, which arise as they try to sustain their connections to the past. This story of survival shines brightly.” —Publishers Weekly
The long-awaited, profoundly moving, and unforgettable new novel from PEN Award–winning Native American author Mona Susan Power, spanning three generations of Yanktonai Dakota women from the 19th century to the present day.
From the mid-century metropolis of Chicago to the windswept ancestral lands of the Dakota people, to the bleak and brutal Indian boarding schools, A Council of Dolls is the story of three women, told in part through the stories of the dolls they carried.
A modern masterpiece, A Council of Dolls is gorgeous, quietly devastating, and ultimately hopeful, shining a light on the echoing damage wrought by Indian boarding schools, and the historical massacres of Indigenous people. With stunning prose, Mona Susan Power weaves a spell of love and healing that comes alive on the page.
Mona Susan Power is an enrolled member of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe. She is the author of four previously published works of fiction, A Council of Dolls, The Grass Dancer, Sacred Wilderness, and Roofwalker. Her short stories have been published by The Atlantic Monthly, The Paris Review, The Best American Short Stories, and more. Mona is a graduate of Harvard and the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She lives and teaches in Saint Paul, Minnesota.
“The stories in Chrysalis shine as thoughtful, surprising, horrifying, tender portrayals of urgent transformation. Varghese’s dedication to upending expected queer and immigrant narratives, and to spotlighting complexity in relationships is welcome and invigorating.” —Xtra
Genre-blending stories of transformation and belonging that centre women of colour and explore queerness, family, and community.
A couple in a crumbling marriage faces divine intervention. A woman dies in her dreams again and again until she finds salvation in an unexpected source. A teenage misfit discovers a darkness lurking just beyond the borders of her suburban home.
The stories in Chrysalis, Anuja Varghese’s debut collection, are by turns poignant and chilling, blurring the lines between the real world and worlds beyond. Varghese delves fearlessly into complex intersections of family, community, sexuality, and cultural expectation, taking aim at the ways in which racialized women are robbed of power and revelling in the strange and dangerous journeys they undertake to reclaim it.
Anuja Varghese is an award-winning writer and editor based in Hamilton, ON. Her work appears in Hobart, Corvid Queen, Southern Humanities Review, The Malahat Review, The Fiddlehead, and Plenitude Magazine, as well as the Queer Little Nightmares anthology, among others. Her stories have been recognized in the PRISM International Short Fiction Contest and the Alice Munro Festival Short Story Competition and nominated for the Pushcart Prize. Her debut short story collection, titled Chrysalis (House of Anansi Press, 2023) explores South Asian diaspora experience through a feminist, speculative lens. In 2023, Chrysalis won the Writers Trust of Canada Dayne Ogilvie Prize for LGBTQ2S+ Emerging Writers and the Governor General’s Literary Award for Fiction.
“One of the most pleasurable, inventive reads of the year… fiendishly, deliciously fun.” —San Francisco Chronicle
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world’s troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef’s boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
C Pam Zhang is the author of Land of Milk and Honey and How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific American Award for Literature[CE1], longlisted for the Booker Prize, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, and one of Barack Obama’s favorite books of the year. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 honoree and a New York Public Library Cullman Fellow.