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Published Mar 2015
384 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.
Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.
In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor.
The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.
"Starred Review. Hannaham's skill at portraying the worst of human experience while keeping you glued to the page - and totally taken with the characters - is nothing short of magic." - Publishers Weekly
"Starred Review. A Southern farm provides the backdrop for a modern-day slavery tale in this textured, inventive and provocatively funny novel... A poised and nervy study of race in a unique voice." - Kirkus
"This is a book of astonishing originality and power... Hannaham reinvents the Southern gothic with prose at once brutal and lyrical and drop-dead gorgeous. This is a hell of a novel." - Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and The Circle
"James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival." - Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad
"Delicious Foods is a strange and compelling American horror story, arrived at through fresh narrative strategies." - Daniel Woodrell, New York Times bestselling author of The Maid's Version and Winter's Bone
"A completely unforgettable, original, and singular novel by a brave, exciting new writer. - Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow
"Bury me with this book, so I will remember how wonderful living was - the food, the words, the stories, the places, the feeling of freedom. Delicious Foods is a magnificent novel, full of the beauty a great writer can make of even the most terrifying parts of life." - Rebecca Lee, author of Bobcat
This information about Delicious Foods was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No, which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
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