French Novelist Maylis de Kerangal Takes on the Culinary World

The post was produced in partnership with Bloom, a literary site that features authors whose first books were published when they were 40 or older. 

“Little by little, his sensations become more precise; at each stage of the preparation they are mobilized as one, coalesced into a single movement, as if the boy himself were being unified; it’s synesthesia, a feast, and now he can cook by ear as well as with his nose, hands, mouth, and eyes. His body exists more and more, it becomes the measure of the world.”

                                                                        -The Cook

Novelist Maylis de Kerangal hails from Le Havre, France. Before publishing her first novel, Je Marche Sous un Ciel de Traîne, in 2000, she worked as an editor in the children and youth department at Éditions Gallimard, one of France’s leading publishers.

Naissance d’un Pont (Birth of a Bridge), de Kerangal’s eighth book, won the Prix Medicis in 2010 and the Prix Gregor Rezzori in 2014. The English translation of her book Réparer Les Vivants (The Heart)—published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux and translated by Sam Taylor—was named one of The Wall Street Journal’s Ten Best Fiction Works of 2016 and won the 2017 Wellcome Book Prize.

Now, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, thanks to the indispensable work  (),which follows the path of a young Frenchman named Mauro as he rises through the ranks of the culinary world while struggling to preserve his identity and integrity as a cook with a singular vision.