The Cookbook Collector: A Novel

by Allegra Goodman Narrated by Ariadne Meyers

Overview

Heralded as “a modern day Jane Austen” by USA Today, National Book Award finalist and New York Times bestselling author Allegra Goodman has compelled and delighted hundreds of thousands of readers. Now, in her most ambitious work yet, Goodman weaves together the worlds of Silicon Valley and rare book collecting in a delicious novel about appetite, temptation, and fulfillment.

Emily and Jessamine Bach are opposites in every way: Twenty-eight-year-old Emily is the CEO of Veritech, twenty-three-year-old Jess is an environmental activist and graduate student in philosophy. Pragmatic Emily is making a fortune in Silicon Valley, romantic Jess works in an antiquarian bookstore. Emily is rational and driven, while Jess is dreamy and whimsical. Emily's boyfriend, Jonathan, is fantastically successful. Jess's boyfriends, not so much-as her employer George points out in what he hopes is a completely disinterested way.

Bicoastal, surprising, rich in ideas and characters, The Cookbook Collector is a novel about getting and spending, and about the substitutions we make when we can't find what we're looking for: reading cookbooks instead of cooking, speculating instead of creating, collecting instead of living. But above all it is about holding on to what is real in a virtual world: love that stays.

Editorial Reviews

NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile

Goodman’s novel focuses on two sisters and their lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, around the end of the 1990s and through 9/11. Jess is the airy philosophy major who ends up in love with a mysterious collection of rare eighteenth-century cookbooks while Emily is an intense software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Their lives are touched and changed by partners, friends, trees, estranged family members, the stock market, and other connections. Ariadne Meyers narrates with an enthusiastic, if not overly feminine, touch. It works well with the sisters but less so with several male characters, who are portrayed as either growlers or slackers. Still, Meyers’s humorous embodiment of two quirky rabbis is highly entertaining. R.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

NOVEMBER 2010 - AudioFile

Goodman’s novel focuses on two sisters and their lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Berkeley, California, around the end of the 1990s and through 9/11. Jess is the airy philosophy major who ends up in love with a mysterious collection of rare eighteenth-century cookbooks while Emily is an intense software entrepreneur in Silicon Valley. Their lives are touched and changed by partners, friends, trees, estranged family members, the stock market, and other connections. Ariadne Meyers narrates with an enthusiastic, if not overly feminine, touch. It works well with the sisters but less so with several male characters, who are portrayed as either growlers or slackers. Still, Meyers’s humorous embodiment of two quirky rabbis is highly entertaining. R.M. © AudioFile 2010, Portland, Maine

Product Details

BN ID:	2940171965112
Publisher:	Penguin Random House
Publication date:	07/06/2010
Edition description:	Unabridged

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