The Chinese-American author C. Pam Zhang has followed up her Booker-longlisted debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold (2020), with what might be the most sensuous novel of the year. Zhang has said that her new book began as a “pandemic project”, describing it on social media as “a novel about food, female appetite, class, culinary hierarchy, and the sticky-sensual necessity of finding one’s own pleasure in a world gone to shit”.
The mark of the lockdown bears heavily on the text, not least in the nameless narrator’s recounting of “gray days and gray nights, no lovers no family no feasts no flights”. We are, in marked thematic contrast to Zhang’s debut – a retelling of the American West from the perspective of Chinese immigrants – in a dystopian near future in which food is disappearing. Our narrator is a Chinese-American chef lured to work in a colony of the super-rich on an Italian mountainside (referred to by a border guard as “Terra di latte e miele”). After she arrives, “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”.
