A Book and a Bite

The theme of this book group a simple - incontrovertibly fine books accompanied by slightly more controversial, interpretive food pairings for each selection.

For our first book after a summer holiday we will read The World we Saw Burning, by the Peruvian novelist and journalist Renato Cisneros. A powerful story of migration, memory, and our shifting sense of home, this novel will also serve as an introduction to the wonderful Edinburgh-based Charco Press, which focuses on finding outstanding contemporary Latin American literature and bringing it to new readers in the English-speaking world.

You're very welcome to join us in the first Book Book and a Bite of the New Year. We will meet monthly, and there is no commitment beyond whichever meeting you decide to attend.

Matías Roeder, a young man with an Italian father, German mother, and a sense of stagnation he is desperate to escape from, hops a boat from Peru to New York with vague plans but a firm intention to never go home again. This familiar story of migration—the odd jobs, the romances, the Bowery bars—goes sideways when Japan bombs Pearl Harbor and he joins the US Air Force as part of a bombing crew. Matías is now Matthew, in the belly of a B-17, remade by the vertigo and rawness of aerial warfare. But the past comes roaring back when he trains his sights on his beloved grandfather’s hometown of Hamburg. Matías’s reckoning unfolds in the interstices of other stories, swapped by two more Peruvians – a journalist and a cabdriver – stuck in a present-day Madrid traffic jam, whose lives in Lima are now as distant as World War II was to their homeland. The World We Saw Burning is both a striking account of war and a reflection on identity and uprootedness in a time when everything seems on the verge of exploding or disappearing forever.