Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen - Softcover

In her enchanting and much-anticipated debut novel, Kate Taylor entwines the stories of three women to create a haunting and glorious tale that spans the twentieth century.

In turn-of-the-century Paris, Jeanne Proust, a cultivated Jewish woman married to a Catholic doctor, writes in her diaries of personal and global events. The Dreyfus Affair, tomorrow?s menu, the building of the Panama Canal, and her family?s health are duly noted in the precise retelling of her family?s daily life. But her most constant theme is her son Marcel. Plagued by grandiose social aspirations, unfulfilled literary ambitions, and chronic asthma, Marcel will not settle down to bourgeois life.

Mme. Proust?s diary is increasingly interrupted by its translator, Marie Prévost, who is poring over these documents in the Bibliothèque Nationale. Marie?s obsession with the diaries and their translation is refuge from her own disappointment, an unrequited love for the enigmatic Max.

The final strand of this sophisticated novel tells the story of Sarah Bensimon, a twelve-year-old Parisian refugee sent to Canada to escape the Nazis. As a young adult she returns to Paris to discover that her parents have perished, but closing the door on her past proves difficult and back in Toronto she settles into an uneasy womanhood. Alienated from her doctor husband and teenage son, she seeks refuge in her kitchen, where she recreates a kosher version of classic French cuisine.

Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen is a compassionate novel, extraordinary in its elegance and passion.

“Magnificent . . . Like Michael Cunningham in his prizewinning The Hours, Taylor adopts a tripartite structure to show how events in a writer’s life and themes in his work have resonance for subsequent generations. Taylor’s is, however, much the richer, subtler and less deterministic work. . . . truly inspired.” -- The Times (London)

“Take this splendid book to bed with you. . . . It will be a surprise if Mme. Proust and the Kosher Kitchen doesn’t work its way on to thousands of bedside tables with the same word-of-mouth recommendation that turned Mary Lawson’s Crow Lake into a bestseller.” -- The Globe and Mail

“Reads like a dream, meticulously crafted and researched, sophisticated in style and structure.” -- National Post

“Kate Taylor achieves, with seemingly effortless grace, a remarkable feat: the near-perfect balance between being true to history and writing an engaging fictional tale . . . the stunning debut of a writer from whom we can expect much in the future.” -- Calgary Herald


From the Trade Paperback edition.