"This deliciously sensuous story of resistance, rebirth, and hunger for a better life is driven by an extraordinary heroine who becomes poison-taster to a French aristocrat."
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.
| Primary Genre | Literary Fiction |
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She can taste anything.
Everything.
Every ingredient in a recipe.
The earth in which the potatoes were grown.
The tree on which the fruits were ripened.
She can taste it all.
In the soot-streaked alleys of 19th-century London, Minha is a girl unlike any other - born with an extraordinary gift: an overwhelming, all-consuming sense of taste. Desperate to escape a life of poverty, she crosses the sea to France, chasing the shimmer of a better future.
At Château de Bellefalaise, a grand estate with fairytale turrets perched above a sleepy village, Minha's talent is discovered when she detects poison in a dish about to be served to the château's master, Duc Nicolas. For the first time in her life, her strange ability becomes her salvation - and her curse. Appointed the Duc's personal poison-taster, she is confined to her tasting room and forced to live in the chateau's shadows. With each dish, she enters a world of glittering porcelain and gilded secrets, where danger simmers beneath every course...
But when she loses her miraculous gift and suspicion coils through the corridors, Minha must confront a terrifying truth: without her gift, who is she - and what remains of the life she's fought so hard to build?
Feast is a sumptuous historical novel brimming with intrigue and sensory wonder - a dark fairytale for readers who love Jessie Burton, Elizabeth Macneal and Bridget Collins.
Feast features in the following genres: Literary Pick of the Month, General Fiction, Historical Fiction, Literary Fiction, Metaphysical / philosophical fiction, Speculative fiction
Feast is available in Paperback, Hardback
Feast was written by Catherine Kurtz and published by Renegade Books an imprint of John Murray Press
Feast has 336 pages
£9.89
