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Published Apr 2010
256 pages
Genre: Literary Fiction
Publication Information
Kirpal Singh is riding the slow train to Kashmir. With India passing by his window, he reflects on his destination, which is also his past: a military camp to which he has not returned for fourteen years.
Kirpal, called Kip, is shy and not yet twenty when he arrives for the first time at General Kumar's camp, nestled in the shadow of the Siachen Glacier. At twenty thousand feet, the glacier makes a forbidding battlefield; its crevasses claimed the body of Kip's father. Kip becomes an apprentice under the camp's chef, Kishen, a fiery mentor who guides him toward the heady spheres of food and women.
In this place of contradictions, erratic violence, and extreme temperatures, Kip learns to prepare local dishes and delicacies from around the globe. Even as months pass, Kip, a Sikh, feels secure in his allegiance to India, firmly on the right side of this interminable conflict. Then, one muggy day, a Pakistani "terrorist" with long, flowing hair is swept up on the banks of the river and changes everything.
Mesmeric, mournful, and intensely lyrical, Chef is a brave and compassionate debut about hope, love, and memory set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of occupied Kashmir.
"Throughout, Kip's emotional passivity stands in opposition to his culinary abilities. Canada-based Singh adroitly blends lyrical accounts of Kip's past with sensual renderings of the cold climate and piquant cuisine. The result is another successful work of fiction from the Indian diaspora." - Library Journal
"With subtle incident and affecting characters, Singh's modest novel makes a sobering foray into a paradise fractured by intolerance and venality but offers little comfort over any prospect of a resolution." - The Independent (UK)
"Singh intersperses poetry, journal entries, Kashmiri script, and, yes, recipes to create a melancholic world where death is forever hovering. The writing is spare, with a tendency to veer toward the fantastic." - Quill & Quire (Canada)
"Chef is an accomplished debut novel that portends even greater things from Singh, a writer who definitely doesn't suffer from an inability to find his own voice." - The Gazette
"An outstanding story about love and betrayal in a time of war, set against the beautiful and mysterious landscape of Kashmir."
- David Albahari
"This novel takes the reader on a sensual word journey from the very first page. Full of sorrows and joys large and small — individual, familial, social, national — this is a book written with a strong, sure and compassionate hand." - Alberta Literary Award for Fiction, Jury
This information about Chef 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.
Jaspreet Singh lives in the Canadian Rockies. He is a former research scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering from McGill University, Montreal. His debut short-story collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize.
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