It's book club week!

This July, as Summer makes its presence felt (and boy, do we feel it), we're picking up Nicole Mones' The Last Chinese Chef. A light read on topics we love to discuss -- China, Chinese food, cooking and love -- this book goes right to the top of our summer reading list.

We're all affirming The Wall Street Journal's claim that, "Both entertaining and learned, The Last Chinese Chef just might be the perfect leisure read. It effortlessly weaves together a fast-paced romantic plot with profound precepts from ancient Chinese food culture. This delicious book will leave you with an intense craving for perfectly prepared Chinese food."We're even tempted to call it the xiao long bao of books! Light but substantial, juicy and always satisfying.

Join us this coming Sunday, the 13th, at 4pm, upstairs at Figaro.

Grab the book at Figaro now, at a discounted price of RMB103. This book is made available by BLUE FOUNTAIN BOOKS.

SYNOPSIS from the Nicole Mones website

You may know Chinese food; you may even love it. But The Last Chinese Chef will take you into a world of Chinese food you never even knew existed. Here is the hidden universe of one of the world's great cuisines. Its philosophy, its concepts, and its artistic ambitions are all illuminated in a story that's entertaining, emotionally satisfying, and erudite.

When widowed American food writer Maggie McElroy is hit by a paternity claim against her husband's estate, she has to go to China immediately. She asks her magazine for time off. They counter with an assignment: to profile rising culinary star Sam Liang.

In China Maggie teases apart the knots of her husband's past, finding out more than she expected about him and about herself. With Sam as her guide, she also journeys deep into a food culture rooted in its own principles and traditions. She is transformed - by the cuisine, by Sam's family, a querulous but loving pack of passionate cooks and diners, and most of all by Sam himself. She begins to feel her soul coming back.

This is a novel of food, friendship, and falling in love, one that will forever change the way you look at Chinese food.

REVIEW from amazon.com

Nicole Mones has mined the endless riches of China once again in The Last Chinese Chef. This time she hits the trifecta: the personal stories of Sam and Maggie, the history and lore of Chinese cuisine, and an inside look at cultural dislocation. Maggie McElroy is a widowed American food writer who is suddenly confronted with a paternity claim against her late husband's estate--by a Chinese family. Her editor offers her another reason to go to Beijing: write an article about a rising young Chinese-American-Jewish chef, Sam Liang. Having sold the home she had with her late husband Matt and reduced her possessions to only the barest necessities, with her life feeling as though it is contracting around her, Maggie embraces the oppportunity to sort out her feelings about Matt's supposed infidelity and do some work at the same time.

She and Sam hit it off right away, even though he is involved in a very important competition for a place on the Chinese national cooking team for the 2008 Olympics. They travel together to the south of China where she meets her husband's possible daughter--with Sam standing by to act as translator--and where Maggie meets much of Sam's family. He has been welcomed back with open arms, even though he occasionally feels that he has one foot in China and one in Ohio. The Beijing uncles and the Hangzhou uncle are a raucous, loving, argumentative bunch of foodies who advise Sam about menus, encourage a romance with Maggie, make him start over again when the dish isn't perfect, and alternately praise and criticize his cooking.

Maggie loves being in the middle of it all and finds herself more and more drawn to Sam. She begins, with Sam's help, to see food as "healing" and understands the guanxi or "connectedness" that takes place around food. At the beginning of each chapter is a paragraph taken from a book entitled The Last Chinese Chef, written by Sam's grandfather and translated by Sam and his father. Mones has written that book, too, which is an explanation of the place of food in Chinese history and family life. The novel is rich with meaning and lore and an examination of loving relationships. Don't even touch this book when you're hungry. The descriptions make the aromas and textures float right off the page. --Valerie Ryan

READ and LISTEN to EXCERPTS here.

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