Comfort Eating by Grace Dent

This book, the second memoir from the restaurant critic Grace Dent, will make you hungry. Dent is both a Guardian columnist and a Masterchef judge but like many of the best food writers – Nigella Lawson is another – did not start her career writing about food. Dent has written eleven novels for young adults and had a much-missed column called World of Lather about soap operas first. 

Comfort Eating the memoir shares its name with the podcast on which she interviews celebrities about the snacks they eat behind closed doors and plenty more besides. From Siobhan McSweeney and her snack of Cadbury’s Dairy Milk with cheese and onion Taytos and a swig of Guinness to Stephen Fry with his tinned fish, it is is a revelatory and intimate podcast. The book is far cosier than her previous memoir, Hungry (2020) which was a surprisingly profound account of her life so far – as she says it reflected on both “Findus Crispy Pancakes and Alzheimer’s disease.” 

Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang

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”.

The Hedgehog Diaries by Sarah Sands

A book about hedgehogs is not the obvious next step for Sarah Sands, the former editor of Radio 4’s flagship news programme Today, and before that editor of the Evening Standard. But then Sands has had a rough time of it lately. In The Hedgehog Diaries, she recounts the death of her father, Noel, the news broken to her by her brother, Kit Hesketh-Harvey, who had to climb through a window of her Norfolk house to do so since she wasn’t answering her phone. Hesketh-Harvey, who was a writer and performer and a great favourite of the King, died not long afterwards of heart failure. Julian Sands, the actor made famous by his role in A Room with a View and the father of her eldest son, Henry, went missing while hiking on a Californian mountain in January this year, not long before Hesketh-Harvey died. The actor’s body was not discovered until June.

It might therefore be understandable that Sands has been thinking a great deal about life and death and that she latched on to the poorly hedgehog she and her two-year-old grandson found trapped in the netting by her pond one day.

Autumn Reads 2023

Autumn is the perfect time to pick up a new book. It’s when publishing’s so-called Super Thursday occurs – the single day when the highest number of best-selling hardback titles is estimated to hit the shelves.

This year, in the lead up to Christmas, new books from Richard Osman, Stephen King and JK Rowling writing as Robert Galbraith, will appear. There will also be memoirs from Britney Spears, Barbara Streisand and Jada Pinkett Smith. If these aren’t to your taste, here’s our choice of Autumn’s other hottest books.

The Fraud Zadie Smith

Another banger from Willesden’s finest export and possibly the most anticipated novel of the year. This is Zadie Smith’s first attempt at historical fiction, and she has said how much pleasure writing The Fraud gave her: “Every day I sat down at my desk I was happy and laughing to myself and satisfied.” It shows, although her enjoyment is not at the expense of the reader’s.

Monocle Podcast on Zadie Smith's 'The Fraud'

In more than two decades since Zadie Smith burst onto the literary scene with her debut novel, White Teeth, her books, essays and short stories have continued to enjoy commercial and critical success. Her latest novel brings to life the story of the Tichborne case – one of the lengthiest trials in British history and one that enthralled Victorian England. I joined Robert Bound and Alex Preston to review Smith’s first exuberant foray into historical fiction.

We also made recommendations for further reading and watching.

The Collected Works of Jo Ann Beard

Jo Ann Beard has said that one of the stories in this collection, although she does not specify which, took her more than 20 years to write and that there was a gap of eight months – during which she was working on the piece five days a week – between two of its sentences. It is true that her writing is remarkably condensed, not least in ‘Cheri’, the story of a real woman who had a particularly hideous case of terminal cancer (exacerbated by the fact that all pain medication made her vomit). Cheri Tremble contacted Jack Kevorkian, a euthanasia expert sometimes nicknamed ‘Dr Death’, so that he could help her end her life. As she begins to die, Cheri, in Beard’s version, wryly reflects: ‘The fear of dying tonight is nothing… compared to the fear of still being alive tomorrow morning.’

Beard has barely been published in the UK, but her fans include Jonathan Franzen, Sigrid Nunez and Jeffrey Eugenides. Mary Gaitskill has called her ‘a kind of literary celebrity that very few people have heard of’.