'Mexico'

Tita has a gift for food. Her cooking is divine, so finely prepared that a single bite moves the eater to great emotion. Though Tita has fallen in love, tradition dictates that the youngest daughter, Tita, remain at home to take care of her mother. To add insult to injury, Tita’s mother arranges for Tita’s older sister to marry the man Tita loves AND asks Tita to make the wedding cake. The bitter tears Tita weeps as she whips the cake batter give the wedding guests a remarkable reaction, proving that there’s more to Tita’s gift than meets the eye.

Each chapter is prefaced by one of Tita’s hand created recipes.

While Crazy Rich Asians focuses more on the topsy turvy relationship of Rachel Chu and secret billionaire Nicholas Young than cooking, it has some mouth-watering descriptions of food:

“As Rachel tasked the char kuay teow, her eyes widened in delight at the rice noodles flash-fried with seafood, egg, and bean sprouts in a dark soy sauce….Then it was time for the satay. Rachel bit into the succulent grilled chicken, savoring its smoky sweetness carefully.”

YUM.

Kitchens of the Great Midwest is bursting with food. The opening scene details the preparation of lutefisk, and then moves on to braised pork shoulder, chocolate habaneros, heirloom tomatoes and more. There are recipes peppered throughout the book too – Kraft caramel bars and chile oil being two examples. As this is set mainly in Minnesota, reading it is a nostalgic trip for your tastebuds.

The book follows Eva Thorvald, daughter of a Midwestern chef, blessed with a once-in-a-generation palate, as she becomes the mysterious chef behind the most sought-after dinner reservation in the country.

While Rutabaga is firmly in the genre of fantasy, it doesn’t make its recipes any less appealing.

Rutabaga, having grown bored of the standard food offerings available in his home town, travels the land searching for strange and magical ingredients to add to his cookbook. Rutabaga’s mouth-watering creations include a Perfect Pep Potion, Stuffed Koraknis Spinwheels with Sliced Pyka’s Palm, and a recipe especially created for those of us who don’t have access to magical ingredients: Chocolate-Dipped Dragon Claws. (The claws are bananas, guys).

A 6,000-mile marathon through North America's stolen land // Álvarez, the son of working-class Mexican immigrants, flees a life of labor in fruit-packing plants and drops out of school where he struggled to fit in to run in a Native American marathon from Canada to Guatemala.

A German Woman's Story of Family, Secrets, and Survival Under Hitler // O’Donnell tells her grandmother’s story as a German during World War II, from falling in love with a man who was sent to the Eastern Front just after she became pregnant, to spearheading her family’s flight as the Red Army closed in.

In a peaceful retirement village, four friends meet weekly to discuss unsolved crimes. When a local developer is found dead, they find themselves in the middle of their first live case.

1634: Samuel Pipps, the world’s greatest detective, is being transported to be executed for a crime he may, or may not have, committed, traveling with his loyal body guard. But no sooner are they out to sea than devilry begins to blight the voyage.