May Reading

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots by Jessica Soffer brings together troubled teen Lorca and newly widowed Victoria.

Based in New York, Victoria begins an Iraqi Jewish cooking class to help her loneliness and Lorca signs up looking for a way to cook herself into her mother’s affections.

Through food and cooking Victoria and Luca become friends and the two form an unlikely bond at the most difficult time of their lives…  But could more than just a love of cooking be connecting them?

Tomorrow There Will Be Apricots is a real page turner which will have your mouth watering with the food descriptions. You also can’t help but feel a strong connection with the characters. Easily my favourite book this month.

Jessica Soffer says:

This is a story about accepting the people we love—the people we have to love and the people we choose to love, the families we’re given and the families we make. It’s the story of two women adrift in New York, a widow and an almost-orphan, each searching for someone she’s lost. It’s the story of how, even in moments of grief and darkness, there are joys waiting nearby.  Lorca spends her life poring over cookbooks, making croissants and chocolat chaud, seeking out rare ingredients, all to earn the love of her distracted chef of a mother, who is now packing her off to boarding school. In one last effort to prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to track down the recipe for her mother’s ideal meal, an obscure Middle Eastern dish called masgouf.  Victoria, grappling with her husband’s death, has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago. An Iraqi Jewish immigrant who used to run a restaurant, she starts teaching cooking lessons; Lorca signs up.  Together, they make cardamom pistachio cookies, baklava, kubba with squash. They also begin to suspect they are connected by more than their love of food. Soon, though, they must reckon with the past, the future, and the truth – whatever it might be. Bukra fil mish mish, the Arabic saying goes. Tomorrow Apricots May Bloom.