The Cook: a Novel

More like a poetic biographical essay on a fictional person than a novel, The Cook is a coming-of-age journey centered on Mauro, a young self-taught cook. The story is told by an unnamed female narrator, Mauro’s friend and disciple who we also suspect might be in love with him. Set not only in Paris but in Berlin, Thailand, Burma, and other far-flung places over the course of fifteen years, the book is hyperrealistic—to the point of feeling, at times, like a documentary. It transcends this simplistic form, however, through the lyricism and intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal’s prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of kitchen work.

In The Cook, we follow Mauro as he finds his path in life: baking cakes as a child; cooking for his friends as a teenager; a series of studies, jobs, and travels; a failed love affair; a successful business; a virtual nervous breakdown; and—at the end—a rediscovery of his hunger for cooking, his appetite for life.

Maylis de Kerangal is an award winning and critically acclaimed author of several books, including Naissance d’un pont (published in English as Birth of a Bridge) winner of the 2010 Prix Franz Hessel and Prix Médicis; Réparer les vivants, whose English translation, The Heart, was one of the Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and longlisted for the Booker International Prize; and Un chemin de tables, whose English translation, The Cook, was a New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice.

Sam Taylor is a British author, translator and former pop culture correspondent for The Observer, a job he left in 2001. His first book, The Republic of Trees, was published in 2005 and received critical acclaim.