The Cookbook Collector

By Allegra Goodman
(Dial Press Trade Paperback, Paperback, 9780385340861, 432pp.)

Publication Date: July 12, 2011

Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover, Hardcover, Paperback, Paperback

Categories: Literary

Selected by Indie Booksellers for the Summer '11 Reading Group List

Allegra Goodman’s novels include Intuition and Kaaterskill Falls. Her fiction has appeared in The New Yorker and Best American Short Stories. She is a winner of the Whiting Writer’s Award and a fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. She lives with her family in Cambridge, Massachusetts. For more information, visit www.AllegraGoodman.com or become a fan on Facebook.

Book reviews can be pretty liberal about comparing authors to Jane Austen, but here's a writer who actually lives up to that association. Allegra Goodman's The Cookbook Collector stars two sisters struggling to decide between wealth and virtue in dot-com-era California. More at NPR.org

Contemporary authors have a habit of lazily shoplifting plots and characters from 19th-century fiction -- especially the works of Jane Austen. But even though Allegra Goodman's latest novel, The Cookbook Collector, is a modern riff on Sense and Sensibility, her homage quickly comes to have a glorious life of its own. More at NPR.org

“If you’re hankering for a feast of love, let yourself fall under the spell of Allegra Goodman’s abundantly delicious tale.”—The New York Times Book Review

“A modern take on Sense and Sensibility . . . a beautifully textured tale of two sisters that hits all the Jane Austen high notes . . . [Allegra] Goodman delicately navigates her characters’ complex emotions.”—People (four stars)

“The plot may be IPO-centric, but the novel is old-fashioned and wildly romantic.”—Time

“Goodman makes us care so much about each character and his or her individual story that the pages cannot turn fast enough.”—Los Angeles Times
 
“A novel of impressive élan and real emotional resonance.”—Entertainment Weekly
 
“Sisters find that love can be wondrously, or tragically, accidental. Ms. Goodman is a romantic realist who dazzles with wit.”—The Wall Street Journal