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By: Monica Ali
Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali’s fiction. She has been compared to Dickens and called one of three British novelists who are “the voice of a generation” by Time magazine. Here, in In the Kitchen, she vividly paints a portrait of mini UN assembly that staff the restaurant in London’s Imperial Hotel.
Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. But when a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement, the tenuous balance of Gabe’s life is disturbed. Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which change the course of the life he knows—and the future he thought he wanted.
“Part Kitchen Confidential, part murder mystery” (The Daily Beast), In the Kitchen is utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. It is a brilliant and riveting work from one of our most acclaimed young writers.
Readers and reviewers have been stunned by the breadth of humanity in Monica Ali’s fiction. She has been compared to Dickens and called one of three British novelists who are “the voice of a generation” by Time magazine. Here, in In the Kitchen, she vividly paints a portrait of mini UN assembly that staff the restaurant in London’s Imperial Hotel.
Gabriel Lightfoot, executive chef at the once-splendid Imperial Hotel, is trying to run a tight kitchen. But his integrity, to say nothing of his sanity, is under constant challenge from the competing demands of an exuberant multinational staff, a gimlet-eyed hotel management, and business partners with whom he is secretly planning a move to a restaurant of his own. But when a worker is found dead in the kitchen’s basement, the tenuous balance of Gabe’s life is disturbed. Enter Lena, an eerily attractive young woman with mysterious ties to the dead man. Under her spell, Gabe makes a decision, the consequences of which change the course of the life he knows—and the future he thought he wanted.
“Part Kitchen Confidential, part murder mystery” (The Daily Beast), In the Kitchen is utterly contemporary yet has all the drama and heartbreak of a great nineteenth-century novel. It is a brilliant and riveting work from one of our most acclaimed young writers.
