Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen

Description

The lives of three women intersect in this delicate and surprising novel about memory and loss, prejudice and unrequited love - not to mention literature and cooking as cures for heartbreak. Their stories criss-cross between Paris in the 1890s at the height of the Dreyfus affair, France in 1942, and present-day Canada. Marie Prevost is a contemporary Canadian who sets off for Paris to research Proust and escape a failed romance - finding instead Mme Proust's 'unpublished diary' in the archives. Sarah Bensimon is a young Parisian Jew whose parents spirit her out of occupied France, and who ends up in Toronto. Marrying into an orthodox family, she takes refuge in her kitchen, recreating a kosher version of classic French cuisine. The third woman is Madame Jeanne Proust herself, fragments of whose 'diaries' are recreated with impeccably researched detail - as she worries about Marcel, his late-night habits, his diet and his unsuitable friends. All these strands are bought poignantly together - the new world and the old, the Seine and the St Lawrence, mothers and sons, outsiders and insiders - in this intelligent and beautifully judged debut novel.

Kate Taylor is a Toronto writer and cultural journalist, born in France and raised in Ottowa. She has been a theatre critic at The Globe and Mail, winning awards for her reviews and has also contributed to Canadian Art, Applied Arts and The Arts Today on CBC Radio. In 1989 she published Painters, a biography of Canadian artists written for children. She is currently an arts columnist for The Globe and Mail.

' Magnificent-Like Michael Cunningham in his prizewinning The Hours, Taylor-shows how events in a writer' s life and themes in his work have resonance for subsequent generations. Taylor' s is, however, much the richer, subtler, less deterministic work...truly inspired' Michael Arditti, The Times