The award-winning food writer chooses the books that have most affected her. Her audiobook, “Around the Table, 52 Essays on Food and Life” is on Audible and Spotify now, and published by Mitchell Beazley in October.
Revolutionary Road
Richard Yates, 1961
I would need to live several lives before I’d have the insight to write this. A collapsing marriage – the resentment, the longing for more, the imagined conversations – and the shattering of the American Dream in 1950s suburbia. This shook my soul.
Foster
Claire Keegan, 2010
Claire Keegan’s writing is spare, small scale. She leads you into what you think is a small world – a young girl is taken to stay with a childless couple while her mother has another baby – but it’s a huge world where love brings hope and disappointments are made bearable. A perfect novel.
A Thousand Acres
Jane Smiley, 1991
Sisters in Iowa fight over the inheritance of their father’s farm when he decides to retire. A brutal story about what families are capable of, with more than an echo of “King Lear”. I read it in one sitting.
Say Nothing
Patrick Radden Keefe, 2018
An account of the Troubles in Northern Ireland, with the actions of IRA volunteer Dolours Price (she tried to blow up the Old Bailey) and the kidnap and murder of mother Jean McConville at its centre. The structure of such a complex narrative is breathtaking, as is the way Radden Keefe inhabits the minds of those involved. I grew up in the Troubles and could almost smell the Northern Irish countryside.
A Well-Seasoned Appetite
Molly O’Neill, 1995
Molly O’Neill writes about food better than anyone else. It’s not her recipes but her prose. A granita is a “shale of glassy crystals”, and her first taste of aubergines is like a short story: she eats the smoky flesh while listening to the local radio station and news of Watergate.