The Cheffe A Cook's Novel

From the Booker Prize-nominated author of Three Strong Women: an elegant, hypnotic new novel about a legendary French female chef--the facts her life, the nearly ineffable qualities of her cooking, and the obsessive, sometimes destructive desire for purity of taste and experience that shaped her life.

Winner of the 2020 National Translation Award in Prose

Continuing her tradition of writing provocative fiction about fascinating women, here Marie NDiaye gives us the story of a Great Female Chef--a chef who was celebrated as one of the best in a world where men dominate, and the way that her pursuit of love, pleasure, and gustatory delights helped shape her life and career. Told from the perspective of her former assistant (and unrequited lover), now an aged chef himself, here is the story of a woman's quest to the front of the kitchen--and the extraordinary journey she takes along the way.

MARIE NDIAYE was born in Pithiviers, France, in 1967; spent her childhood with her French mother (her father was Senegalese); and studied linguistics at the Sorbonne. She was only eighteen when her first work was published. In 2001 she was awarded the prestigious Prix Femina for her novel Rosie Carpe; in 2009, the Prix Goncourt for Three Strong Women; and in 2015, the Gold Medal in the Arts from the Kennedy Center International Committee on the Arts. She lives in Berlin. Translated from the French by Jordan Stump.