Man
Hardcover
Description
Man has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime, the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden, and her beloved Maman, who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter, Maman finds Man a husband--a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal. Thrown into a new world, Man discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art, with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion, time and place, and even bring her customers to tears. Man is a mystery--her name means "perfect fulfillment," yet she and her husband seem to drift along, respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris, everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch, and Man discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair. Full of indelible images of beauty, delicacy and quiet power, Man is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language, its sensuousness and its love of life.
Praise For Man…
#1 BESTSELLER (Quebec)
“Love is ever-present in Mãn, in all of its guises.”
—Le Devoir
“With Mãn, her second novel, Kim Thúy shows she’s no one-book wonder. After the immense success of Ru, a book inspired by her own life, she shows that she’s equally capable of telling the stories of others: their exiles, their families, their passions, their sacrifices.”
—La Presse
“Sentence by sentence, Kim Thúy allows us to discover Vietnam through its history, its vocabulary, its food and its customs…. In addition to bringing us the happy and tragic destinies of immigrants, Mãn also proves that Kim Thúy is the greatest of romantics.”
—The Huffington Post Québec
Random House Canada, 9780345813794, 160pp.
Publication Date: August 26, 2014