Peachy Reads

Amazing and seemingly perfect Amy goes missing on her fifth wedding anniversary. The police quickly find evidence that suggests her husband, Nick, may be implicated in her disappearance. The story is first told in Nick’s voice and subsequent chapters suggest an alternative history made up of entries from Amy’s diary, describing a disintegrating marriage and a wife increasingly fearful of her husband. The diary makes Nick look like an unbalanced husband capable of murder until halfway through the book when the narrative does a complete turnaround and we find out that Amy may not be the victim we were led to believe after all. It’s a gripping story, one that’s not easy to put down, and has overtones of Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent or the movie Fatal Attraction . Amy and Nick, two unreliable narrators, make this a guessing game until the finish, and the novel’s resolution will probably be a surprise to everyone. With the right cast, this will surely make a blockbuster mov...

This novel follows the inhabitants of one rather affluent street in London, Pepys Road, in the year 2008, a time when the collapse of Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers changed the financial landscape of London and the world seemingly forever. One family on Pepys Road lives a life of conspicuous consumption and when the head of the household doesn’t get an anticipated £1 million year-end bonus at his Canary Wharf banking institution, some difficult choices have to be made. Their Hungarian nanny hooks up with the Polish laborer who works at various houses along the road, a Zimbabwen meter maid whose immigration status is in question frequents the street, and a Pakastani family runs the corner shop. Additional characters are introduced, all linked by their association to Pepys Road. It’s sort of a posh East Enders. I didn’t really want it to end, even at 500+ pages. It brought to mind Jeffrey Eugenides or Jonathan Franzen, or certainly Zadie Smith’s White Teeth .

Marcus Samuelsson is one of those celebrity chefs you see more and more frequently on cable. His international background and cool, almost intellectual demeanor may set him apart from the others, but his Swedish background is what fascinated me. Adopted at an early age from Ethiopia, he grew up in Göteborg, Sweden, where his Swedish mormor infected him with her enthusiasm for cooking. His disciplined pursuit of a culinary dream took him to Switzerland, Austria, France, New York, (and many other destinations as he worked on a cruise ship), where he added to his lexicon of tastes and flavors that inspire his reimaginings of classics and inform his new creations. Yes, Chef shows how difficult it is to make it as a successful chef, perhaps even more so in the U.S.  in what traditionally has been a domain dominated by white males. Marcus Samuelsson proves that being a chef, even a celebrity chef, involves an extreme amount of hard work and dedication. His is a fascinating story...