Chop Chop

Chop Chop Synopsis

Shortlisted for the Costa First Novel Award 2014.

Outrageously funny and completely original, Chop Chop by Simon Wroe is the story of a hapless young chef in the crazed world of the professional kitchen, featuring lust, revenge, neurosis and haute cuisine. Confirms all your worst fears about professional kitchens in a debut novel that is dark, pungent, twisted, surprising and above all genuinely funny.

If you enjoy eating out, don't read this book . (William Sutcliffe, author of Are You Experienced). Raucous and inventive, peopled with technicolour characters and savagely funny, Chop Chop announces Simon Wroe as both an heir to Martin Amis and an oven-fresh talent unto himself . (A D Miller, author of Snowdrops).

A complete page-turner. Reminiscent of Kitchen Confidential but with an entirely fresh voice that is a pleasure to read . (Thomasina Miers, founder of Wahaca). A brutally funny look at the world of professional cooking. Sometimes the truth is so strange it needs to be sauteed in a pan of fiction . (Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story).

Furiously funny, fast, surreal. The heat and the profanity feel painfully real; the prose, masterfully stylized, definitely the stuff of fiction . (Anya von Bremzen, author of Mastering the Art of Soviet Cooking). Two months behind on his rent, young graduate Monocle swallows his dreams and takes the only job he can find: the lowest-rung chef in a gastropub in Camden.

Here he finds himself surrounded by a group of deranged hoodlums (his co-workers) and at the mercy of an ingenious sadist (the head chef, Bob). What follows is a furiously-paced, ribald, raucous and unexpectedly touching tale of loyalty and revenge, dark appetites and fading dreams, and a young man finding his way in the world as he is plunged into the fat and the frying pan and everything else besides.

Simon Wroe is a former chef who writes about food and culture for Prospect and the Economist, and has contributed to a wide range of publications including The Times, Guardian, Telegraph and Evening Standard. He is 30 and lives in London. This is his first novel.