Cooking the Books: The Paris Novel by Ruth Reichl (10 Jul 2025)

‘No one writes about food like Ruth Reichl… I consider her essential nourishment.’ NIGELLA LAWSON Ripping open the envelope, she read Celia’s last words to her. There was just one line written on the paper: ‘Go to Paris.’ The last word anyone would use to describe Stella St. Vincent is adventurous. She’s perfectly comfortable with the familiar, strict routines of her life as a copyeditor in New York. Or at least, she is until she receives a mysterious note from her late mother and a one-way plane ticket to Paris.  Alone and overwhelmed in a foreign city, Stella avoids new people and ventures out as little as possible. But then she meets Jules, an octogenarian art collector with very different ideas about how she should spend her time in the French capital. And to start with, there’s a vintage Dior dress with her name on it.  Somewhere between the cramped shelves of Shakespeare and Company bookshop, the crisp tablecloths of the Brasserie Les Deux Magots and a pile of discarded paintings at a busy flea market, long-buried truths about Stella’s own past begin to emerge. Soon she starts to wonder if there might not have been more to her mother’s suggestion than she first suspected… ‘Ruth Reichl is one of our greatest storytellers. No one writes as warmly and engagingly about the all-important intersection of food, life, love, and loss.’ ALICE WATERS