Land of Milk and Honey

Description

NATIONAL BESTSELLER

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK 

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY NPR, HARPER’S BAZAAR, TOWN & COUNTRY, KIRKUS REVIEWS, ESQUIRE, ELECTRIC LITERATURE, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN AND MORE!

“One of the most pleasurable, inventive reads of the year… fiendishly, deliciously fun.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“A profound exploration of human nature, the allure of pleasure and the choices we make in the face of adversity.”—NPR, “Books We Love”

“It’s rare to read anything that feels this unique.” –GABRIELLE ZEVIN, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.”–ROXANE GAY, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist

“A sharp, sensual piece of art.”–RAVEN LEILANI, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world

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.Praise for Land of Milk and Honey:

“Dwells with keen intelligence and rich insight at this nexus of food, pleasure, privilege and catastrophe, offering a mouthful of nectar that tastes faintly of blood.” —The New York Times

“Gloriously lush. Zhang’s sensuous style makes us see, smell and, above all, taste the lure of that sun-dappled mountain enclave. . . An atmospheric and poetically suspenseful novel about all manner of appetites: for power, food, love, life.”—NPR/Fresh Air

“Haunting. . .[Foodies] will find Land of Milk and Honey a gourmand’s dream. . .tense, unnerving and creepy. . .an extremely atmospheric novel about the interplay of environmental destruction and class. The bittersweet aftertaste will leave you considering what you’d be willing to do — or resist doing — to experience the most essential pleasure.” —Ron Charles, The Washington Post

“A sensory fantasia, rich in luscious descriptions of food, sex, and nature. In these beguiling pages, Zhang tells a powerful story about the thorny intersections of privilege and pleasure.”—Esquire

“Mesmerizing. . .A bold encouragement to dwell within our desires, even if we ultimately decide that the consequences do not justify the pursuit. [Zhang’s] message is an addendum to the two stark words—’she wants’—that ended her first novel. Now she seems to be saying: She wants so that she may live.” —The Atlantic  

“Richly lyrical and chillingly propulsive. . .With sentences as decadent as the meals they describe, C Pam Zhang brilliantly exposes how, in a climate of scarcity, sensuous indulgence always comes with a side of moral complication.” —Oprah Daily

“Zhang’s formidable talents in world-building sparkle. . .Zhang beholds the world through a lens that’s far from despairing. By sprinkling her fiction with smart, speculative touches, she reveals that we as humans can still imagine better, more brilliant outcomes when looking toward the past, present and future. And for Zhang and her readers, taking this route can be fiendishly, deliciously fun.”—San Francisco Chronicle

“The most breathtakingly beautiful dystopian novel since Station Eleven.” —Los Angeles Times

“Sensuous and sharp in its critique, Land of Milk and Honey delivers a powerful rebuke of how far the privileged will go to retain a level of comfort amid climate catastrophe. . .A knotty read from start to finish, C Pam Zhang’s latest is sure to stay with you for a long time.” —Chicago Review of Books

“Land of Milk and Honey makes it clear that representations of dystopia are becoming less radical, less striking now than depictions of pleasure. We don’t need to use our imagination—everywhere we look, we encounter cruelties small and large, born of desperation or malice…As an antidote, Zhang’s portrayal of pleasure—of appetites merged and fulfilled—reads as a radical, unfamiliar balm to readers like me. And as Zhang’s narrator slowly sets aside her skepticism and regains her appetite, this antidote grows only more radical.” —Los Angeles Review of Books

“[A] fresh and ultimately hopeful take on one vision of climate change and how humanity might persevere.” —Good Housekeeping, October Feel Good Book Club Pick

“Deeply original and provocative.”—Town & Country

“[A] sensuous, gutting novel.” —Vanity Fair

“Gorgeously written and deeply unsettling.” —Shondaland

“C Pam Zhang’s lush but precise descriptions and inventive premise create a thought-provoking fusion of the sensory and the speculative.”—Scientific American, “Best of the Year”

“Utterly haunting, important and—in spite of the fact that it’s a dystopian novel about climate change—it never loses its sense of hope. . . a fascinating look at the choices we make.”—San Antonio Magazine

“Majestic . . .Zhang may be one of the first novelists to devote serious attention to the ways that the climate crisis may disrupt the world’s food supply. . .Zhang reframes the urgency of this disaster in a way that even the finest journalistic or academic work cannot, evoking the day-by-day human experience of inhabiting a dying planet and attempting to obtain pleasure wherever one can find it.” —New Republic

“Exquisite and seductive. . .Emotionally captivating and raw, this masterpiece will be enjoyed to the last bite.”—Publishers Weekly, STARRED review

“Reminds us of what it’s like to be embodied and living on Earth with sumptuous scenes of food and sex. . .Mournful and luscious, [Land of Milk and Honey is] a gothic novel for the twilight of the Anthropocene Era.”—Kirkus, STARRED review

“Sensuous, surprising, and alluring.”—Electric Literature, “Electric Lit’s Best Novels of 2023”

“Land of Milk and Honey is a lush, sensual story that revels in food and pleasure—and, at the same time, casts light on who gets and doesn’t get the privilege of indulging in such experiences.” —Bon Appetite

“A sumptuous — and at times, unsettling — exploration of pleasure.”—Eater

“Inventive and original exploration…a sensual love letter to food itself.”—W Magazine

“This unique take on contentment, privilege and survival is entrancing from beginning to end.” —Artful Living Magazine

“[Zhang’s] prose. . .mirrors the sensual pleasures of a fine meal.”—theSkimm

“Establishes [Zhang] as a literary force.”—KMUW

“A book of appetite, rich with ideas and emotion. Zhang possesses a wonderfully bold and playful imagination; this novel is further proof of her extraordinary talent.” —Katie Kitamura, bestselling author of Intimacies

“The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional.” —Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist

“It’s rare to read anything that feels this unique. A richly imagined, ambitious, and haunting novel that is striking for its deft juxtaposition of small, human moments with larger concerns about the world.” —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow

“A sharp, sensual piece of art…This is an incredible exploration of whether it is possible to preserve one’s art when answering to a master that is not yourself. When I read I’m always searching for pleasure, for the want, and this book helped me feel something.” —Raven Leilani, New York Times bestselling author of Luster

“No one writes like C. Pam Zhang. Ferocious, sensual, and all consuming, Land of Milk and Honey is both a heartsick elegy for a world we are on the verge of losing and vibrant homage to pleasure and appetite. This book swallowed me whole and spit me out changed in the best way: buzzing, astonished, and alive.” —Rachel Khong, author of Goodbye, Vitamin

“A brilliant, all-too-prescient novel. Extraordinary in its prose, vision, and power, Land of Milk and Honey is a triumph of a book to devour now and to treasure through the ages.”—R.O. Kwon, bestselling author of The Incendiaries

“A twelve-course feast for the senses and intellect. C Pam Zhang is one of the most talented novelists writing today, and she has given us a novel that is original and painful and sensuous, a honey-and-acid tasting menu exploring pleasure, loss, sex, power, and resurrection.” —Sarah Thankam Mathews, author of National Book Award Finalist All This Could Be Different

“A dazzling, virtuosic meditation on seeking joy amid tragedy, beauty amid ruin. As hypnotic as it is profound, Land of Milk and Honey showcases C Pam Zhang’s singular talent.” —Kirstin Chen, New York Times bestselling author of Counterfeit
 
“Gorgeous. What a delicious world Zhang has created—full of so much wonder. I’ll be thinking for a long time about what this novel says about desire and morality; what it means to try to stave off extinction of oneself and world; what happens when we are forced to reckon with the lies we’ve spent years telling ourselves.” —Kat Chow, author of Seeing Ghosts

“C Pam Zhang is an intoxicating and fearless prose stylist who seems to invent a new language with each book. . . the incantatory rhythms of desire that power [the novel] serve us horror and pleasure in each bite.” —Meng Jin, author of Little Gods
 
“Intoxicating, timely, and beautifully written. Pam Zhang’s exquisite prose and prodigious talents are pushed to their brink in her new, dazzling novel.” —Jamil Jan Kochai, author of National Book Award Finalist The Haunting of Hajji Hotak

“A brilliant, near-future fairytale, Land of Milk and Honey is the most sensuous novel about food I’ve ever read.”—Emma Donoghue, bestselling author of Room

“Deeply humane and fiercely political, this book is feast of delights, of appetites denied and realised, surfeit and sacrifice, scarcity and want, passing and vulnerability, luxury and the quotidian, the terrifying, vertiginous workings of the hyper-wealthy, and how we might ground ourselves and continue to exist in a broken world.  I adored it.”—Helen Macdonald, New York Times bestselling author of H is for Hawk and ProphetC Pam Zhang is the author of 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] , long-listed 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.

1. C Pam Zhang’s Land of Milk and Honey tells a near-future story about a chef who takes a job at a wealthy mountaintop colony, escaping her everyday troubles in a smog-filled world. How does the setting impact your understanding of the characters, their circumstances, and their views of livelihood?

2. The narrator prepares decadent meals for an enclosed elite community, while the rest of society has a scarcity of money and resources. Compare and contrast between individuals of different class and status. How are various forms of privilege manifested throughout the book?

3. In the novel, the protagonist makes a difficult career choice, one that is contrary to her mother’s wishes. They fundamentally disagree about food, appetite, sustenance, and survival. What do you make of the protagonist’s decision to devote her life to cooking? How do her motivations evolve as the plot develops?

4. As a private chef, the protagonist discovers a new palette full of pleasure. How do you interpret the connections between the sensory (e.g., color, touch, taste) and desire? Or between sensuality and indulgence?

5. Zhang employs rich language and imagery to depict a decaying world that feels palpable. What are the effects of juxtaposing lush details with the landscape of an arid environment? How does she achieve tension?

6. Lies and deception are soon uncovered, and the protagonist must take on responsibilities she hadn’t foreseen. What does it mean for her to take on the identity of someone else—specifically as “Eun-Young,” a motherly figure?

7. Faith becomes an integral part of the colony. How does faith function and shape the community when the world otherwise lacks hope? How is faith complicated by the potential for individuals to manipulate it as power?

8. The protagonist builds an intimate relationship with her employer’s daughter, Aida. Consider their relationship in relation to the dynamics between Aida and her parents, and between the protagonist and her own family. How do these dynamics play out, and what do they reveal about the protagonist and Aida as individuals?

9. The novel places emphases on rules, obedience, social obligations, and ethics. What parallels do you see to these ideas in our world today?

10. Isolation is a factor that significantly impacts the characters. How might it influence their concepts of good and evil? How do they seek, or defy, connection and belonging in their community?

11. Toward the end, scientific and technological advances play an empowering yet destructive role within nature and civilization. What might the story be saying about humanity—and about our comprehension of progress, joy, and/or meaning?

12. What would you imagine the protagonist is looking for at the end of the book? What do you think she sees, and believes in? How has she transformed?

One

I fled to that country because I would have gone anywhere, done anything, for one last taste of green sharp enough to pierce the caul of my life. I was twenty-nine, a hungry ghost, adrift. I hadn’t seen California in ten years, hadn’t tasted a strawberry or a leaf of lettuce in three. Hunger was simple, as the rest was not.

Here is the rest: I was an American stranded in England when America’s borders closed; I was a cook as that profession lay dying. Both troubles shared one source, namely the smog that spread from a cornfield in Iowa and soon occluded the sun, smothering as it went fields of wheat in Canada and paddies of hard yellow rice in Peru. No more lemon trees fragrant on the slopes of Greece, no more small sweet Indian mangos. Biodiversity fell. Wildlife and livestock perished for lack of feed. Scientists bickered over the smog’s composition and politicians over whether pollution or lax carbon taxes or China or nuclear testing or America or Russia were to blame, and all the while the darkness, slightly acidic, ate its way through fertile fields. America plunged into famine while my career hung suspended by the sea—the wrong sea, the oily, inhospitable Atlantic. Each morning I walked to the American consulate to hear the answer, Soon. Each afternoon I thawed frozen fish at the restaurant that underwrote my refugee visa. My life was dredge, fry, plate. My life was wait, wait, wait.

The day the letter arrived from California was the day the chef announced pesto cut from the menu for good. No more nuts and seeds in the pantry, and no basil, not even the powdered kind. I barely heard. I slipped my envelope into the walk-in freezer, as if ice might cool desire.

With my back against chilled steel, I extracted not an American reentry permit but a bill. The attached letter informed me that my dead mother’s apartment in Los Angeles had burned down. Regrettable accident, the lawyer wrote of the riot that caused it, and then, legally liable. Cataloged in exhaustive detail were waste disposal fees and firefighting fees and city emissions fines, but nowhere did the bill mention the color of the apartment walls, which I could no longer recall. No avocados, no strawberries, no almonds. California had become a food desert and I imagined wind howling through broken windows, scouring, dry, unclean.

The door opened as I was doing the math. Chef says break’s over, a line cook told me. He wants you to make a sub for the pesto.

With what?

The cook kicked a bag of flour on his way out. Anything you want, princess, so long as you use this shit.

The flour puffed in a fine gray cloud. No parsley, no sage, no produce of any sort. It was spring. March. But a false spring in which crops would fail for the third year running. Blame the smog’s acidic nature, as some did; blame the same anhydrites that doomed the dinosaurs, or a lack of sun and morality; what it amounted to was skies that were gray and kitchens that were gray, you could taste it, gray. No olives, no quails, no grapes of the tart green kind for Champagne. I took stock of the restaurant’s dwindling supplies: dusty tins, icy slabs of years-old fish. Mostly it was bag after bag of the mung-protein-soy-algal flour distributed by the government.

We were lucky to have it! they said. The flour was a miracle of nutritional science, engineered from plants that tolerated dark. Lucky the smog had taken a year and a half to reach Europe, lucky to escape the famine that ravaged the Americas and Southeast Asia, lucky that mung-protein flour was calorie for calorie cheaper than the cobbled-together diets of old. Yet the flour was gritty and gray, and the bread it baked could not be coaxed to rise. I am speaking of an occlusion in my twenty-ninth year, a dimming of how far I could see in front of me; I am speaking not only of the air.

Chef had lost its meaning, like lucky, like fresh, like soon. No saffron, no buffalo meat, no polished short-grain rice. Dishes winked out from menus like extinguished stars as a conservative, nativist attitude seized the few restaurants that remained open thanks to government subsidies. As they shut borders to refugees, so countries shut their palates to all but those cuisines deemed essential. In England, the shrinking supplies of frozen fish were reserved for kippers, or gray renditions of cod and chips—and, of course, a few atrociously expensive French preparations with which a diner might buy, along with sour wine, the illusion that she still lived in luxury. Back to stodgy safety. Back to national dishes unchanged for hundreds of years. The loss of pesto should have come as no surprise in a world with no favas, no milkfish, no Curry Lane in London or Thai Town in LA, no fusion, no specials of the day, no truffles turned out like sheepish lovers from under their blankets of sod. We were lucky, those around me said. We survived.

But in the dimness of that refrigerated room I could no longer see a future for the halibut dish without pesto, as I could not fathom the depth of my debt, or the tint of cloudless sky. Couldn’t see what it was for which I survived. I was alien to the Brits with their stiff upper lips; if I had a friend in that dank port town, it was the drunk who haunted the half-empty supermarket, proclaiming the end of everything.

That day, I knew. A world was gone. Goodbye to all that, to the person I’d been, to  she who’d abandoned, half-eaten, a plate of carnitas under blaze of California sun. It wasn’t grease I missed so much as the revelation of lime. Waiting on grief, I met hunger.  For radish, radicchio, the bitter green of endive.

**
And so I quit that job to pursue recklessly, immorally, desperately, the only one that gave me hope of lettuce. The position was private chef for what advertised itself as an elite research community on a minor mountain at the Italian-French border. A quick search turned up that controversy. The community’s objective was to bioengineer food crops capable of withstanding smog, all discoveries to be shared with the Italian government—but because funding came from private investors, to strike the deal parliament had ceded one of the rare high-elevation zones still blessed by occasional sunlight. And so the mountain was populated by investors and their attendant scientists, staff, medics, field hands, et cetera who enjoyed carte blanche when it came to how they met their lofty research goals. Apart from quarterly check-ins by the Italian ministry of agriculture, there were no monitors, no police presence, no communications out or in: the mountain governed itself with diplomatic immunity. The howling online was thunderous. A beast who is fat may buy his own country!! I read in one of the auto-translated comments, which confused me until I looked up an alternate translation: Rich monster.

All that mattered to me was the job’s promise of fresh produce, but—here was the catch—no guarantee of a long-term visa. It was a ten-week contract-to-hire. At-will employment, at my employer’s will.

Colleagues at the seafood restaurant inquired after my sanity when I resigned. They reminded me of the thousands begging for my work visa.

I wasn’t unaware of the risk. It was for this reason that I supplemented my application with lies. The job called for a formally educated, French-trained chef capable of working with unusual ingredients and turning out exquisite haute cuisine, and so I hammed up my experience. Education at Le Cordon Bleu in Paris, sous chef at a Michelin-starred restaurant that closed when its owner was found hanged from a string of her own saucissons—no one to refute my claim. If I hesitated at my lies, or at the extreme isolation the community demanded (nondisclosure agreement, no phone, no internet, no contact, no family, no leaving restaurant grounds without permission)—if I hesitated at my younger self’s declaration that everyone would taste my food, that cooking was an art neither frivolous nor selfish—well. I was no longer she who’d left California with scruples and ambition; as I did not know who I was, exactly, I molded myself to the application’s shape.

Only at the end of the form did I concede to honesty. I am your perfect candidate, I wrote in the open text field, because I have nowhere on earth to return to. I will faithfully perform any task within reason, and with dignity.

Possibly this was insane. It’s true that my sole confidant before leaving England was the supermarket drunk. You understand, I whispered, I have to do this. His breath, as he kissed my palm, had the antiseptic coolness of mung-protein flour. Shoppers gave us wide berth. They lied to themselves, as scientists lied, as politicians lied, as my employer with his opacity and his dubious wealth must have lied, too. I only cared that he provide a head of shriveled lettuce; even iceberg would do. That was my wish. That was my fantasy.

**
I first began to sense something beyond the dusty rim of the plate I called my life when I received my acceptance. There was no further clarification of my duties. Just one sheet of thick, expensive paper that gave off a hint of citrus, plus a scent I couldn’t name, grassy and sweet. On the front was the location where I’d be picked up by private jet. On the back, a handwritten note. I, too, am a dignified man, my employer wrote, a fact you will see for yourself.

And so I crossed into the land of milk and honey knowing nothing, not even the country’s true name. It was the officer at the Italian border who first said, Terra di latte e miele?

It was three in the morning. I’d flown through the night and could not quite see where I’d landed, nor my interrogator’s face. The hatred in his voice was so intimate that I wondered if I knew him.

No thanks, I don’t want coffee, I said, latching to the one word I thought I understood. I understood nothing, my god.

I hadn’t encountered that odd, archaic phrase before my arrival; I wasn’t meant to. They hid the country’s true name as they hid its true nature. After Italian immigration, it was the mountain’s private security that held me for hours, taking my passport, my retina scans, the measurements of my face and waist and earlobes, my blood, my phone, my photo. This last made the guard pause for so long that I grew nervous. The picture I’d sent in my application was slightly blurred, taken from a distance, my features indistinct. As if, should I be discovered, I might plausibly deny being myself.

The guard touched her throat. — — —— -, she said, and let me pass.

It was in the small hours of morning that I drove up the mountain in a discreet black car. The wind nipped, hard, and though the air up high was smogless, it was cheerless, too. Rocks scrawled gloomy warnings in the dark. Occasionally a compound would loom, then vanish, in a flash of high, cold wall that seemed intent on excluding me—an impression that proved correct, because never would I be invited into the homes and private lives of those investors. The piece of mountain I claim is heat and toil, soft flesh and the hard taste of salt.

What fields I passed were sere and dead. No sign of spring, for all my employer’s grandiose goals. I’d pared my expectations down to dried herbs by the time I reached the mountain’s peak.

**
The restaurant at the top appeared as a hulking box the same dark hue as the sky it rose against. No windows broke the monotony of those walls. A cliff behind dropped into abyss and the front lawn, while vast, was muddy. I found the lights off, no answer at the locked door. I stood shivering and perplexed as the sky lightened.

The door clicked open at last. I stepped through just as sun rose over the mountain.

Much later it would occur to me that he had timed this moment, my employer with his flair for the dramatic, a man who named his country with a prophet’s arrogance. The light was stunning, transcendent, a white-hot bullet between the eyes. From behind my fingers I saw dark walls blush lavender, orange, pink. The restaurant was built of two-way glass, opaque from without and transparent from within, so that on my first morning I had the impression of no walls, no windows, no doors, just the suspension of my body in sky, sky, sky, sky, sky. I had traveled, it seemed, through those low, smoggy years to emerge in this vessel of light.

I would come to know the restaurant in its many moods. Blue by day, apricot at sunset, bruised by the advent of night or storm. The view never ceased to awe. All the rest of my time I’d experience headaches, mild vertigo, a kind of drunkenness on the light that gilded the dining rooms, and pooled in the bed in the suite labeled EMPLOYEES ONLY, and made a blaze of the chef’s coats I found in the closet, along with a white silk dress, floor-length, some housekeeper’s mistake.

The kitchen was the room most loved by light. Sun streamed down and made the white appliances one continuous pour of milk. I wanted to lick it; I settled for touch. I strummed the marble counters and turned dials on the twelve-range stove, and when I ran a hand over the backsplash I discovered under my fingers ivory suede, an insane material, impossible to keep clean, but so plush it held my imprint. As I stood at the window counting the Tiffany fish knives, I felt a euphoria such as the first European colonizers must have upon sighting new land. Mine, I thought, and it wasn’t for a while that I realized the kitchen was empty of food.

On my second pass, I spotted a box behind the door. Impress me, this note said. Inside were flour, vanilla, eggs.

I’d expected a test, of course: a textbook omelet, or a flawless consommé to prove the French training the job demanded. Pastry, no. Giddiness abandoned me as I unpacked baking soda, sugar, milk. Even the voluptuousness of the butter couldn’t distract from thoughts of my spotty experience in pâtisserie, and the precarity of my visa, and what would happen were I turned away—and then I was no longer thinking because at the bottom of the box I touched something as warm as skin, as yielding as a woman’s inner thigh: strawberries.

Amen, I heard myself say, wet-mouthed. I was surprised my breath didn’t smudge the air. Red: that color of desire. I began again and said the whole prayer, Our Father through daily bread. Not my words. They belonged to a pastry chef I’d loved, a lapsed Catholic who rediscovered his faith each morning as he fingered the day’s shipment of fruit, and forgot it anew each afternoon as we fucked among the butterand jam. He was the first to take seriously my appetites, my ambitions. He never stored a strawberry cold. Close to the stem, he said, closest to the earth, their perfume is complex, not sugar: closer to flesh, the flesh of a loved one, not sanitized, not anodyne, but full of many waters. Strawberries and spring, strawberries and musk, strawberries and sex flooded back as I crushed my tongue to sugar. I’d come to that countryhardly daring for bitter green and here, now, this rupturing sweetness. I couldn’t remember what hour it was, how many time zones I’d crossed, when I’d last eaten. For years I’d fed, survived, swallowed my portions of gray—but had I hungered for pleasure?US

Additional information

Weight	14.6 oz
Dimensions	0.8700 × 6.2100 × 9.3400 in
Imprint	Riverhead Books
Format	General Trade
ISBN-13	09780593538241
ISBN-10	0593538242
Author	C Pam Zhang
Audience	General / adult
BISAC	FIC055000, FIC054000
Subjects	asian fiction, dystopian fiction best sellers, dystopian fiction, Asian American, relationship books, FIC054000, fiction books, books fiction, realistic fiction books, book club recommendations, asian authors, best books, new york times best sellers, dystopian books, Asian American novel, asian american fiction, asian american novels, asian novels, novels, fiction, Friendship, romance books, coming of age, Food, literary, book club books, dystopia, Literature, asian, FIC055000, book club, dystopian, foodie gifts, literary fiction, books for women