Madame Proust and the Kosher Kitchen

The lives of three women intersect in this delicate and surprising novel about memory and loss, prejudice and unrequited love - not to mention literature and cooking as cures for heartbreak. Their stories criss-cross between Paris in the 1890s at the height of the Dreyfus affair, France in 1942, and present-day Canada. Marie Prevost is a contemporary Canadian who sets off for Paris to research Proust and escape a failed romance - finding instead Mme Proust's 'unpublished diary' in the archives. Sarah Bensimon is a young Parisian Jew whose parents spirit her out of occupied France, and who ends up in Toronto. Marrying into an orthodox family, she takes refuge in her kitchen, recreating a kosher version of classic French cuisine. The third woman is Madame Jeanne Proust herself, fragments of whose 'diaries' are recreated with impeccably researched detail - as she worries about Marcel, his late-night habits, his diet and his unsuitable friends. All these strands are bought poignantly together - the new world and the old, the Seine and the St Lawrence, mothers and sons, outsiders and insiders - in this intelligent and beautifully judged debut novel.