Published in 2003
261 pages
Monique Truong, born in Saigon, came to the U.S. as a refugee. She currently lives in New York City. Her first novel, The Book of Salt, was a New York Times Notable Book and a national bestseller. It won the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Stonewall Book Award-Barbara Gittings Literature Award, and the 7th Annual Asian American Literary Award. Her second novel, Bitter in the Mouth, received the American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Rosenthal Family Foundation Award and named a 25 Best Fiction Books by Barnes & Noble and a 10 Best Fiction Books by Hudson Booksellers. She is the recipient of the PEN/Robert Bingham Fellowship, Princeton University’s Hodder Fellowship, Guggenheim Fellowship, and U.S.-Japan Creative Artists Fellowship.
What is this book about?
Binh, a Vietnamese cook, flees Saigon in 1929, disgracing his family to serve as a galley hand at sea. The taunts of his now-deceased father ringing in his ears, Binh answers an ad for a live-in cook at a Parisian household, and soon finds himself employed by Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas.
Toklas and Stein hold court in their literary salon, for which the devoted yet acerbic Binh serves as chef, and as a keen observer of his “Mesdames” and their distinguished guests. But when the enigmatic literary ladies decide to journey back to America, Binh is faced with a monumental choice: will he, the self-imposed “exile,” accompany them to yet another new country, return to his native Vietnam, or make Paris his home?
