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Publishes
Sep 26, 2023
240 pages
Genre: Fantasy, Sci-Fi, Speculative, Alt. History
Publication Information
The award-winning author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold returns with a rapturous and revelatory novel about a young chef whose discovery of pleasure alters her life and, indirectly, the world
A smog has spread. Food crops are rapidly disappearing. A chef escapes her dying career in a dreary city to take a job at a decadent mountaintop colony seemingly free of the world's troubles.
There, the sky is clear again. Rare ingredients abound. Her enigmatic employer and his visionary daughter have built a lush new life for the global elite, one that reawakens the chef to the pleasures of taste, touch, and her own body.
In this atmosphere of hidden wonders and cool, seductive violence, the chef's boundaries undergo a thrilling erosion. Soon she is pushed to the center of a startling attempt to reshape the world far beyond the plate.
Sensuous and surprising, joyous and bitingly sharp, told in language as alluring as it is original, Land of Milk and Honey lays provocatively bare the ethics of seeking pleasure in a dying world. It is a daringly imaginative exploration of desire and deception, privilege and faith, and the roles we play to survive. Most of all, it is a love letter to food, to wild delight, and to the transformative power of a woman embracing her own appetite.
"Exquisite and seductive…Emotionally captivating and raw, this masterpiece will be enjoyed to the last bite." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
"[C Pam Zhang] reminds us of what it's like to be embodied and living on Earth with sumptuous scenes of food and sex...Mournful and luscious, [Land of Milk and Honey is] a gothic novel for the twilight of the Anthropocene Era." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Richly lyrical and chillingly propulsive...With sentences as decadent as the meals they describe, C Pam Zhang brilliantly exposes how, in a climate of scarcity, sensuous indulgence always comes with a side of moral complication." —Oprah Daily
"The most breathtakingly beautiful dystopian novel since Station Eleven." —Los Angeles Times
"A book of appetite, rich with ideas and emotion. Zhang possesses a wonderfully bold and playful imagination; this novel is further proof of her extraordinary talent." —Katie Kitamura, bestselling author of Intimacies
"The way Zhang writes about food and desire and human failings is exquisite—sensually detailed, at times visceral. This is a tremendous novel that explores the way people will break when the world itself is broken. Land of Milk and Honey is truly exceptional." —Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Bad Feminist
"It's rare to read anything that feels this unique. A richly imagined, ambitious, and haunting novel that is striking for its deft juxtaposition of small, human moments with larger concerns about the world." —Gabrielle Zevin, New York Times bestselling author of Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow
This information about Land of Milk and Honey 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.
Photo: © Gioia Zloczower
Born in Beijing, C Pam Zhang is mostly an artifact of the United States. She is the author of How Much of These Hills Is Gold, winner of the Academy of Arts and Letters Rosenthal Award and the Asian/Pacific Award for Literature; nominated for the Booker Prize; and a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a Lambda Literary Award. Zhang's writing appears in Best American Short Stories, The Cut, McSweeney's Quarterly, The New Yorker, and The New York Times. She is a National Book Foundation 5 Under 35 Honoree.
Name Pronunciation
C Pam Zhang: zhahng
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