About the Book:

From the author of If You Still Recognise Me comes a delicious story of two people brought together by a shared love of food as they figure out themselves and each other.

Auden is finding different ways to be themself. The first – using their new chosen name, which feels most authentically them. The second – starting a food blog where they can share their passion for food, through family recipes and the stories behind them. And when the blog brings them Valerie, they discover more than they’d ever expected.

It’s been over a year since Valerie lost her mum – her beautiful, vibrant mum who loved cooking. Since her mum’s death, Valerie and her dad have drifted further and further apart, the kitchen left cold and empty, until Valerie finds Auden’s blog. The blog (and its writer) spark something in Valerie. Could she have found a recipe for happiness?

Add the book to your Goodreads shelves here. Read Sifa’s review here. Find this book on Bookshop.org (affiliate link).

---

About the Author:

Cynthia So is the author of If You Still Recognise Me, which was shortlisted for the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize and the YA Book Prize in 2023. They were one of the new voices in Proud, an anthology of LGBTQ+ YA stories, poems, and art by LGBTQ+ creators, published in 2019. Their short fiction and poetry have also appeared in Uncanny Magazine, Strange Horizons, and Anathema, among others. Cynthia was born in Hong Kong and lives in London with their wife.

Website | Twitter/X | Instagram

---

Food in THIS FEAST OF A LIFE

I love food. I always have. I love writing about it too – it’s almost as good as eating it. I was editing my first book, If You Still Recognise Me, during the winter of 2020, in the middle of another lockdown, and I was dreaming of the day I’d get to eat out at restaurants again. So I kept adding more and more food to the novel, and writing it felt like such a comfort. Describing the tastes, the textures, the colours of a dish. For inspiration, I perused food blogs and salivated over the pictures. But more than that, I was hungry for the sharing of a meal. The conversations around a table, the laughter. For most of that year, I had eaten alone in my small bedroom, longing for company.

When I was trying to figure out what to write for my second book, I kept returning to the theme of food. Readers always tell me that If You Still Recognise Me made them hungry. Why not play to my strengths? I decided to write a love story where food plays a central role. I thought about the food blogs I’d read. I know people get annoyed about how much preamble you have to scroll through before you get to the actual recipes, but with my favourite food blogs, I don’t mind it so much. A light bulb came on in my head: what if you fell in love with someone through reading their recipe preambles?

That’s how This Feast of a Life was born, the story of a food blogger and a girl who reads their blog. Auden’s learning how to cook from their parents, and they create a blog to record the recipes they’ve learnt, as well as the stories associated with them. It’s also a space for them to try out their chosen name, Auden, which they’ve just picked out for themself and haven’t started using elsewhere yet. Valerie’s mum, who loved cooking, passed away over a year ago. Valerie and her dad, who both don’t know how to cook, have been surviving on ready meals and takeaways alone, growing ever more distant from each other in their grief. But when Valerie finds Auden’s food blog, things begin to change. They meet up and review restaurants together, and through their shared enjoyment of food, they discover so much more about themselves and the possibilities that life has to offer.

Auden and Valerie are both lonely characters in their own ways, but food brings them together. I think about myself in 2020, eating alone in my bedroom day after day for months upon months, not knowing when that would ever end, and then I think about Auden and Valerie sitting at a table together, heads leaning in close, talking about the food they’re eating and about the future, and I feel the glimmer of so much joy – and I hope that’s the feeling readers will find within the pages of This Feast of A Life too.