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  • Published: 1 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446457108
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The heartwarming Richard and Judy Book Club favourite




The unforgettable bestselling story of a girl whose magical gift becomes a devastating curse

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On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. All at once her cheerful, can-do mother tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes perilous. Anything can be revealed at any meal.

Rose's gift forces her to confront the truth behind her family's emotions - her mother's sadness, her father's detachment and her brother's clash with the world. But as Rose grows up, she learns that there are some secrets even her taste buds cannot discern.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is about the pain of loving those whom you know too much about, and the secrets that exist within every family. At once profound, funny, wise and sad, this is a novel to savour.
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Now available to preorder: Aimee Bender's new novel, The Butterfly Lampshade

  • Published: 1 April 2011
  • ISBN: 9781446457108
  • Imprint: Cornerstone Digital
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 336

About the author

Aimee Bender

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a New York Times bestseller, and An Invisible Sign of My Own; and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, Willful Creatures and The Color Master. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.

Also by Aimee Bender

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Praise for The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Intriguing and poignantly written

PA Life

[A] transformative narrative... powerful

San Francisco Chronicle

[Bender] careens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses... brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent

Publishers Weekly

Intense, strange and incredibly moving, it captures the magic and the romance of the unknown. With nods to both Chocolat and The Time Traveler's Wife, this is a beautifully written book and one that you will want to talk about long after you have finished reading it.

Elle

Moving and highly original, this book will make you look at food in a whole new light

Star

Quirky, engaging tale of a family endowed with unlikely gifts, the ties that bind people barely conceal the chasms that divide them

Guardian

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake has at its heart an intriguing and poignant comment on the perils of childhood ... Bender brilliantly dovetails Rose's condition into a parable of the dangers of knowing too much about people, especially your family ... it is fresh and beautifully written

The Sunday Times

A wonderful metaphor for the child's sense of things that are never mentioned, and Bender writes with wit, warmth and insight

The Times

A beguiling, offbeat book that reads like a poem

Daily Telegraph

A book with such beautiful writing that sometimes I have to stop and taste a sentence a second time

Jodi Picoult, Grazia

A lovely book, warm and comforting with moments of sadness and brilliantly written

Bookseller

A truly unique exploration of turbulent family relationships and a young girl on the cusp of adulthood grappling with grown-up emotions.

EasyLiving.com

Aimee Bender has got that cool, quirky American thing going on. Taking an unlikely premise - a girl who discovers she can taste emotions in food - she transforms it into a lovely, lonesome universal tale.

marie claire

An intriguing premise for an original novel about a family and its relationships

Good Book Guide

As delightful as its title suggests.

Glamour

Bender is the master of quiet hysteria... She builds pressure sentence by sentence

Los Angeles Times

Extraordinary

Time Out New York

Haunting... Bender's prose delivers electric shocks... Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange

People Magazine

It's a charming, funny, wistful novel, with serious things to say about feelings people hide and the nature of true nourishment

Saga

It's as beautiful as it is strange. Bender writes such lyrical sentences, you pause over them in wonder. She has an unusual take on life; and makes even the ordinary extraordinary. It's a compulsive page turner. This book is already a best seller in America, and has been embraced by book clubs. I loved it. It's one of those books you don't want to finish - and even when you have - it stays in your mind. Bender has written three previous novels. I intend to savour them all

Irish Examiner

Lose yourself in a fantastical gastronomical journey ... This novel explores familial love in an unexpected way, and you'll be hooked from the first taste

She

The book I wish I had written ... it's so clever

Cecelia Ahern

The book initially reads like the familiar tale of a cosy, suburban middle-class LA household concealing frustrated lives behind an outwardly-cheery veneer. But by kicking the narrative left with the surrealist twist of Rose's psychic tastebuds it becomes so much more: an unpredictable meeting of modern magic and melancholic realism.

The List

This emotional and moving tale blew us away with its beauty

Bella

This is a moving and fantastical tale of the secrets and lies that lurk beneath the surface of a seemingly happy family.

Prima

This novel, in the style of stories like Chocolat, is a dreamy feast of gorgeous writing ... Gently, beautiful, odd, this is a story to sip and savour

Dublin Evening Herald

Ultimate weepy foodie book ... fabulous

Red