Feast

LoveReading Says

Set between London and France in the 19th-century, and simmering with the reinventive spirit of its protagonist, Catherine Kurtz’s Feast is historic fiction at its most fairy-tale enchanting. Think Patrick Süskind’s Perfume but centred on the sense of taste, with a remarkable heroine at its tender, passionate heart.

Told in two timeliness that share Minha’s tough London childhood and move to live with her grandparents in the Kent countryside, and the present, when she crosses the sea to France to make more of her life, Minha came into the world with a remarkable gift: an astonishingly heightened sense of taste. With a “handsome Indian sailor” for a father, and an English lady of the night for a mother, she’s no stranger to being seen as an “exotic” outsider, so it’s thanks to kindly French baker Camille that Minha finds work in the kitchen of Château de Bellefalaise, “a palace, a fairy castle, a place of pale round towers and circular turrets topped with spires”. Soon after arriving, Minha’s acute sense of taste sees her detect poison in the duc’s food, and so the aristocrat makes her his personal poison-taster. 

As a result, Minha spends much of her time confined to a tasting room, seeking solace in the stables, where she stumbles upon an emaciated man who “had the stark, undeniable beauty of a marble portrait, perpetually noble, perpetually smooth and flawless. The beauty of another, higher, world”. Following an act of brutality, Minha loses her gift of taste, and her sense of self (“she was untethered, lacking in her chief method of navigation”), for a time, at least.

Elegantly written, Feast is no thrown-together buffet. Rather, the storytelling is perfectly measured — as delicately layered as the finest pâtisseries feuilletées, and subtly flavoured with themes of prejudice, the kindness of strangers, the kind of bonds that cannot be broken, resistance, and rebirth. Often, the evocation of Minha’s remarkable gift has a Proustian feel, not least when she longs, through her life, for the perfect peach, as enjoyed with her beloved French grandfather in childhood.

Recommended for devotees of Sally Gardner, Jessie Burton, Sarah Waters and Sarah Perry, and for fans of Patrick Süskind’s Perfume and AK Blakemore’s Glutton, Feast is historic fiction at its most richly satisfying.

Joanne Owen

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