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You’re probably not surprised to hear that the Bon Appétit and Epicurious staff is full of bookworms. Now that it’s fall, we love to cozy up with a warm snack and a new book—and if you’re just like us, we’re here to recommend what you should be reading next.
Especially now, as we slither toward Halloween, our book picks look eerie yet delectable: We’re leaning into food and horror, whether that’s cannibalism in A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers, the postapocalyptic end of restaurants in Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang, witchcraft and mysterious “remedies” in All’s Well by Mona Awad, or the ever-present fears that food might manifest about our bodies in The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter.
If you’re not feeling the spooky mood, we’ve also got some more contemporary reads about finding purpose in a dorayaki shop and finding family in a Houston bakery. Plus, essays about comfort food, children’s books about runaway dosas and Filipino desserts, and memoirs about heartbreak and restaurant openings—so there’s likely something on this list that inspires you to curl up with a mug of something delicious and start your next read.
Fiction
Same Bed Different Dreams by Ed Park
Random House, November 7, 2023
Ed Park’s upcoming novel follows a loose theme of unfinished business—dreams, books, chess tournaments, wars, computer games—to imagine a metafictional alternate history about post-colonial Korea. He mixes surreal details from the last decade of history (Kim Jong-il’s obsession with Friday the 13th, or the time The Buffalo News ran the headline “A-bomb Destroys Downtown Buffalo” on its front page) with literary details about the work of Korean writers like Yi Sang, Kim Sowol, and Theresa Hak Kyung Cha.
Memorable and often funny food moments are peppered throughout. For instance, there’s the scene where Canadian hockey star Tim Horton stops into a Buffalo Tim Hortons for some celebrity treatment, a powdered French braid, and a cup of coffee that “could have been the house blend for a chain of Eastern bloc cafeterias.” Another scene, set closer to the present, finds the narrator walking into a restaurant in Manhattan’s Koreatown to trade New York publishing gossip with a group of old friends all the while downing bowls of makgeolli, bottles of soju, and piles of pajeon and jjajangmyeon. Good food, it seems, will find you wherever you are in the multiverse. —Anna Hezel, Epicurious senior editor
Family Meal by Bryan Washington
Riverhead Books, October 10, 2023
In Family Meal, Bryan Washington asks a heart-wrenching question: If love makes you feel wonderfully full, how do you feel when that love is suddenly gone? Cam, a bartender, is grieving the death of his partner, Kai, while trying to repair his tattered relationship with his estranged best friend, TJ. Known for his cooking, Cam regularly makes the people in his life scrambled eggs covered in Cholula and omelets loaded with bean sprouts and chili garlic sauce, but since Kai’s death, he struggles to feed himself or accept food from others. It’s a book that tenderly traces the tangled relationship between grief, desire, and hunger. Each meal in the book, whether a burnt biscuit or a platter of smothered chicken, has so much heft and significance. —Karen Yuan, culture editor
Land of Milk and Honey by C Pam Zhang
Riverhead Books, September 26, 2023
In Land of Milk and Honey’s much-too-near future, a smog has killed most crops and animal species across the globe. Most humans survive on a “mung-protein-soy-algal flour” distributed by governments. The book’s unnamed protagonist works as a chef at one of the few places where food remains colorful and abundant, an “elite research community” high in the sunlit Italian mountains. There, at the behest of a mysterious employer, she cooks lavish, sumptuous dinner spreads for its wealthy residents and guests—C Pam Zhang’s prose bursts with decadence as she describes “meals of yolk and sudden juice,” “larks’ bones crunching in molars like the detonation of a small star,” and “braises and glacé fruits and napkins on which to wipe soiled fingers clean.” Land of Milk and Honey is a lush, sensual story that revels in food and pleasure—and, at the same time, casts light on who gets and doesn’t get the privilege of indulging in such experiences. —K.Y.
The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
Grove Press, May 2, 2023
In this dynamic novel, food might not be the focus, but the multipart story wouldn’t be the same without it. The book follows a family across three generations in the Southern Indian coastal state of Kerala. When the protagonist, who we come to know as Big Ammachi, leaves her home at 12 years old to marry a widower and join him on his family’s estate of Parambil, her first connections are made over food. The women of the family welcome her with coffee brewed in milk and sweetened with jaggery. They teach her to prepare sweet jackfruit halwa, coconut fried beef, and fiery fish curry—all sumptuous dishes that feel like a far cry from her impoverished upbringing. It is through food that Big Ammachi settles into the rhythm of her new household and her new marriage. Abraham Verghese’s descriptions of dishes connect the reader to the land of Kerala and incite hunger to keep reading on, even in the family’s darkest moments of hardship and loss.—Kate Kassin, editorial operations manager
The Thick and the Lean by Chana Porter
Gallery / Saga Press, April 18, 2023
In this near-future version of our world, Beatrice dreams of being a chef. But since she’s growing up in a Big Ag–sponsored community, where food is taboo and women are shamed at weigh-ins if they’ve seemingly consumed too much of the nutrient-dense supplement Seagate uses as a food alternative, becoming a chef seems near impossible. That is, until she learns to ask the right questions, falls hard for a centuries-old cookbook, and learns to forge her own way through the world that Chana Porter has built to make us all question our own relationships to food and our bodies. —Sonia Chopra, executive editor
Heartburn by Nora Ephron and Shmutz by Felicia Berliner
Knopf, March 12, 1983; Atria Books, July 19, 2022
My most recent reads fall into a similar category: Both follow a female Jewish protagonist (one in a failing marriage, one searching anxiously for her husband-to-be), and both include sparse but piquant descriptions of food. In Heartburn, the protagonist (a fictionalized version of Nora Ephron named Rachel Samstat) marvels in disbelief that her husband would consider leaving her—and being deprived of one of her signature recipes. “Even now, I cannot believe Mark would risk losing that vinaigrette,” Ephron writes. “You just don't bump into a vinaigrette that good.” In Shmutz, Raizl, a Hasidic Jewish woman, spirals deeper and deeper into a porn addiction. But even as she strays further from her sheltered Hasidic community, wearing jeans and eating her first bacon egg and cheese, the food of her faith—challah rolls, kokosh cake, and cholent—remains a latent tie to home. Both Heartburn and Shmutz are funny, bright, and achingly honest; the former is worth reading for the vinaigrette recipe alone. —Zoe Denenberg, associate cooking & SEO editor
A Certain Hunger by Chelsea G. Summers
The Unnamed Press, October 18, 2021
After I finished Tender Is the Flesh, Agustina Bazterrica’s dystopian novel about a society that turns to cannibalism after a virus has contaminated all animal meat, I decided to keep the gruesome vibes going with A Certain Hunger. Chelsea G. Summers’s novel is not for the faint of heart, but it’s a lot of fun to read. It tells the story of Dorothy Daniels, a food critic and master cook who eats men—literally. She indulges her homicidal urges by killing her lovers and devouring their organs. Reading those scenes may just push you to become a vegetarian if you aren’t one, but once you get past the gory details, you realize Summers has written a comical critique of food blogging culture. As Dorothy travels between New York and Italy, killing along the way, the novel reads like Eat Pray Love meets American Psycho with a little Hannibal peppered in. It’s perfect for anyone who wants to sit through dinner without everyone whipping out their phones to photograph every single dish on the table. —Esra Erol, senior social media manager
All’s Well by Mona Awad
Simon & Schuster, August 3, 2021
All’s Well starts as a seemingly tame story about Miranda Fitch, a down-on-her-luck theater professor with chronic pain and a penchant for Shakespeare.
After one particularly grueling night of dealing with her ungrateful students, she makes her way to the Canny Man (inspired by the real-life Canny Man’s bar in Edinburgh) and encounters three peculiar men drinking golden liquid. One of the men eerily knows of her pain and shares that he experienced it too—until he discovered “the golden remedy.” She is offered the golden remedy and its promise of soothing her physical ailments. However, the fix is temporary and comes with a price: As she begins to thrive, a mysterious illness consumes the people closest to her.
This seasonally appropriate book ticks all the boxes: witchcraft, horror, and a New England backdrop. It also contains the recipe to make your own golden remedy—sans the sinister consequences. It features whiskey, elderflower liqueur, Angostura bitters, and an orange peel garnish. If you like magical realism, Shakespeare, and asking yourself, What on earth did I just read?, this is the book for you. —Amanda Broll, associate producer
Sweet Bean Paste by Durian Sukegawa
Oneworld Publications, November 14, 2017
In this short and quiet novel, Sentaro whiles away his days working in a dorayaki shop, making pancakes filled with sweet bean paste for an ever-dwindling amount of customers. He struggles to find meaning and ambition in his own life until he meets the elderly Tokue, who helps him find a new way forward in his shop, and yes, gets him to reconsider his perspective on life as well. The book, translated from Japanese by Alison Watts, is beautifully descriptive. While ultimately a novel about friendship and acceptance, the passages where Tokue lovingly prepares the sweet bean paste shine, making dorayaki a main character unto itself. —S.C.
Nonfiction
Recipe for Disaster by Alison Riley
Chronicle Books, March 14, 2023
You’ve read books of essays, you’ve read cookbooks—but have you ever read a book of essays loosely structured as a cookbook? Released earlier this year, Alison Riley’s Recipe for Disaster pulls stories from a cast of voices such as Sarah Silverman, Bowen Yang, and Samantha Irby at their absolute lowest point and offers the recipe for a comfort food that helped them through it. There’s everything from “rejection chicken” to pinwheel cookies that can help pull you through childhood depression to even a simple recipe for some soft scrambled eggs. If you liked the integration of food and recipes in Dolly Alderton’s Everything I Know About Love, or just generally need some reminder that someone else somewhere has also been through it—you’ll appreciate this book. —Megan Wahn, associate commerce editor
Mango and Peppercorns by Tung Nguyen, Katherine Manning, and Lyn Nguyen with Elisa Ung
Chronicle Books, March 16, 2021
This memoir, set in Miami in 1975, tells the story of Tung Nguyen, a pregnant Vietnamese refugee; Kathy Manning, the American sponsor Tung lives with; and Hy-Vong, their much-lauded, no-frills Vietnamese restaurant in Little Havana. Throughout the book, the two women and Tung's daughter, Lyn, take turns describing their past and the trials and tribulations of opening and running a restaurant together. Tensions often ran high between Tung, a gifted but practical and exacting cook, and Kathy, who knew how to work a room and sell a dish but not pay bills on time. Ultimately, it is the story of an unlikely friendship and an unconventional family that somehow managed to create a restaurant with a cult following. Each chapter ends with a recipe: a dish from the restaurant, a childhood favorite, or one of Tung’s creations, such as the restaurant’s signature mango and peppercorn sauce or Tung’s mac and cheese with fish sauce. — Vivian Jao, culinary researcher
Children’s Books
The Spirit Glass by Roshani Chokshi
Rick Riordan Presents, September 5, 2023
In Roshani Chokshi’s middle-grade novel, Filipino folklore gets spun into a quest as our protagonist Corazon adventures through the spirit world in hopes of reconnecting with her family. Food is present throughout the book: a magical House that makes Corazon champorado on weekends; a sorbetes stand run by a pair of ghost siblings who urge Corazon to try a light pink, slightly glittering spoonful of the “nostalgia” flavor (tastes like honeyed autumn sunshine and makes her heart ache); an enchanted rainforest-bakery run by three diwatas, where the layered Filipino dessert sapin-sapin is made not with sticky rice, ube jam, and jackfruit but starlight, sunrise, and sunset. Because this is ultimately a book about magic, hope, love, and grief—and which of those isn’t made sweeter with something good to eat? —S.C.
Runaway Dosa by Suma Subramaniam, illustrated by Parvati Pillai
Little Bee Books, September 5, 2023
This Tamil-nursery-rhyme-inspired rendition of the Gingerbread Man tale (Run, run as fast as you can!) features a plucky dosa who escapes from the breakfast table and leads two children through a magical forest. If you’re familiar with the mythology, the book is a fun way to see the king of the vultures, multiheaded elephant, and other fantastical creatures reimagined to fit the story. But even if you’re not, the lush illustrations of our round, mischievous dosa friend frolicking through a verdant jungle and catchy rhyme—The more you eat, the more you crave / You can’t catch me, no matter how brave!—make this a silly read for all ages. —S.C.