fiction literary-fiction novel recipes womens-fiction

An intoxicating novel about a woman who seduces an entire city with the exotic fare she creates in her home-run restaurant.

Best-selling cookbook author Carol Field turns her talent to fiction in Mangoes and Quince. A feast of the imagination, Mangoes and Quince tells the story of Miranda, abandoned in Amsterdam by her husband Anton, who disappeared into the South Seas. Marooned, but restlessly inspired, Miranda expresses her passion by cooking. But as the restaurant she builds in Anton's ancestral home grows increasingly popular-and along with it, Miranda-her daughter Diana recedes into a world of longing for her lost father.

Under the spell of a manipulative anthropologist, Diana sneaks into her father's two locked private rooms and unearths a trove of strange, local fetishes. Tucked within one sculpture, Diana finds a note from her father. . .

Part mystery, part love story, part family drama-and with original recipes scattered throughout-Mangoes and Quince is a lush and sensuous tale, sure to please.