Reading lists.

· Latest · Indie Awards ·

The Hunger and the Feast

Ten books about eating — and about not eating. Not one comes from a Big Five publisher: eight are from independent houses and two from university presses, and four arrive in translation. Half are feasts: Elizabeth David smuggling the Mediterranean into rationed Britain, Fuchsia Dunlop on why texture beats flavour in Chinese cooking, a Japanese novelist eating her way across colonial Taiwan by rail. Half are hungers: a Soviet labour camp, a Korean mother in a white American town, a culinary school that turns boys into something worse. Most of these have a few hundred ratings between them. Food turns out to be the subject writers do their most honest work on, and the small presses have quietly cornered it.