Mn

About this book

Following on the Giller Prize-nominated and Governor Generals Literary Award-winning success of Ru Kim Thys latest novel is a triumph of poetic beauty and a moving meditation on how love and food are inextricably entwined. Mn has three mothers: the one who gives birth to her in wartime the nun who plucks her from a vegetable garden and her beloved Maman who becomes a spy to survive. Seeking security for her grown daughter Maman finds Mn a husband--a lonely Vietnamese restaurateur who lives in Montreal. Thrown into a new world Mn discovers her natural talent as a chef. Gracefully she practices her art with food as her medium. She creates dishes that are much more than sustenance for the body: they evoke memory and emotion time and place and even bring her customers to tears. Mn is a mystery--her name means "perfect fulfillment " yet she and her husband seem to drift along respectfully and dutifully. But when she encounters a married chef in Paris everything changes in the instant of a fleeting touch and Mn discovers the all-encompassing obsession and ever-present dangers of a love affair. Full of indelible images of beauty delicacy and quiet power Mn is a novel that begs to be savoured for its language its sensuousness and its love of life.