Feast

She can taste anything.
Everything.
Every ingredient in a recipe.
The earth in which the potatoes were grown.
The tree on which the fruits were ripened.
She can taste it all.

In the soot-streaked alleys of 19th-century London, Minha is a girl unlike any other – born with an extraordinary gift: an overwhelming, all-consuming sense of taste. Desperate to escape a life of poverty, she crosses the sea to France, chasing the shimmer of a better future.

At Château de Bellefalaise, a grand estate with fairytale turrets perched above a sleepy village, Minha’s talent is discovered when she detects poison in a dish about to be served to the château’s master, Duc Nicolas. For the first time in her life, her strange ability becomes her salvation – and her curse. Appointed the Duc’s personal poison-taster, she is confined to her tasting room and forced to live in the chateau’s shadows. With each dish, she enters a world of glittering porcelain and gilded secrets, where danger simmers beneath every course…

But when she loses her miraculous gift and suspicion coils through the corridors, Minha must confront a terrifying truth: without her gift, who is she – and what remains of the life she’s fought so hard to build?

Feast is a sumptuous historical novel brimming with intrigue and sensory wonder – a dark fairytale for readers who love Jessie Burton, Elizabeth Macneal and Bridget Collins.

—

‘A beautiful book, vivid and delicious and alive . . . I loved it.’ ALEX HAY