A few years ago, I wrote a post on ‘Food and the crime novel’, focused on Agatha Christie’s clever mystery The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the way a meal in that novel illustrates the deception which is a hallmark of crime fiction. Continue reading “The chef as detective”
Bread – take 2
Back in early 2015, the second year of this blog, I wrote about ‘bread’ in literature, focusing on one of the earliest novels in English, Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, which was published in 1719. Continue reading “Bread – take 2”
Counting calories in literature
However delicious food is, it comes with one significant downside for some of us, namely weight gain. The anxiety about eating – and putting on weight – is one usually (though not exclusively) experienced more by women than men, as a result of the societal pressures placed on women to maintain a particular body weight and shape. Continue reading “Counting calories in literature”
Eating during the Troubles
In my last post I wrote about Paul Lynch’s Booker prize-winning novel Prophet Song set in a near-future dystopian Ireland. We stay with Ireland for this post about Louise Kennedy’s 2022 novel Trespasses, though Trespasses, shortlisted for the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize, is set in Northern Ireland (not the Republic) and in the past, the 1970s, during what is commonly referred to as ‘The Troubles’. Continue reading “Eating during the Troubles”