What an interesting read. I really like this author and always find it intriguing to know what they will write. Definitely recommend

Found this a little disappointing as wanted more of the world and more food. But incredibly written as you'd expect from this author.

Having really enjoyed Zhang's last book, I was intrigued by the ways that this shifted perspective entirely, focusing on someone trying to survive the apocalypse, and the ways that money and power affect who 'gets' to survive.

I found this fun and engaging, with a clever focus on the wider socio-politics surrounding it.

This is a clever novel full of ideas and carefully considered thoughts. It feels important and weighty. Not always fast paced, but methodical and enriching.

Land of Milk and Honey left me in a daze. Although it took a while to get going, the final third completely floored me - even the acknowledgments moved me. As in How Much of These Hills is Gold, C Pam Zhang's writing is beautiful - but this branch into a different genre had my mind buzzing. The quieter apocalypse leaves room for lots of reflection - and rumination on (mostly) delicious-sounding food. (Some of the "food" sounds, purposefully, horrific). The characters perhaps could have been more fully formed - although this adds to the overall still yet ephemeral atmosphere. Although I dutifully fill in a CAWPILE sheet for every book I read, my rating is ultimately based on vibes alone - and a bonus half-star for if a book makes me cry. This caused some welling up, but no full-blown tears - a firm 4.5 star read, which I think will linger in my brain.

This is dystopian fiction for grown ups. Sensuous and edgy, we join a chef as she embarks on a mysterious job in the Italian mountains, cooking for her rich employer using ingredients that have been lost to the world at large.

It's not surprising that our protagonist gives in to the unrelenting misery of her new life following what appears to be the start of the end of the world. She gives us snippets of her life before the smog, her fraught relationship with her mother and her somewhat stilted determination to become a chef rather than a doctor, as her mother would have liked. These flashbacks contrast with the languid reality she finds herself in where she is alone for most of her days, provided with ingredients and required to create masterpieces, her only real interactions for a while are with a cat. That is until she meets her employers enigmatic daughter, Aida.

I found this quite a stilting read and it's definitely weird enough to be divisive. I read it before Saltburn came out but now that I've witnessed the reactions to the scenes in that that push the boundaries, I think anyone who enjoyed Saltburn would enjoy this book. That is to say, it gets uncomfortable but is also compelling, and you might want to stop reading but be unable to turn away.

I may come back to this novel at some point and try to read it over a shorter space of time, as I read it very sporadically and I feel that might have kept me from fully immersing myself in it. It was also so far from what I expected that I think it caught me off guard.

This book was stranger than most stories I read - but I kind of loved it.

Set in the not-too-distant future where climate change means that quality food is the reserve of only the elite, a young chef with literally nothing left to lose finds herself cooking for one of the ultra-elite families and their selected guests.

Rich with queer desire and dystopian isolation, I wonder if this novel has already been optioned to become a film?

'Land of Milk and Honey' is set in an imagined near future in which a deadly smog blocks out the sun and prevents almost all plants from growing, leaving humans reliant on a mung-protein-soy-algal flour which grows in the dark and offers all the nutrients humans need, despite its unappealing flavour.

The narrator, a young Chinese-American chef who is now in Europe and unable to re-enter the US since it closed its borders, instead applies for a job on a top-secret enclave on an Italian mountain (the 'terra di latte e miele' - land of milk and honey) run by a super-rich disaster capitalist which still boasts access to almost every ingredient imaginable. Her application is successful less because of her culinary skills than because of her willingness to 'faithfully perform any task within reason, and with dignity'.

This is a very strange novel in many respects. I found the apocalyptic premise intriguing (and a refreshing change from all the pandemic novels published over the last couple of years!) The world of extreme wealth is compellingly described and there are plenty of lavishly beautiful descriptions of gastronomic pleasure and excess. I did find it a little confusing to follow in places and didn't connect with the characters as much as I'd hoped to. Nonetheless, this was an original and enjoyable read overall - many thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me an ARC to review.

Thanks to NetGalley and the publisher for this ARC.

I adored How Much Of These Hills Is Gold, so I was really looking forward to reading this new novel. It wasn't quite as good, but I appreciated the author's willingness to play with genre and she explored some interesting themes. We're only going to get more books grappling with the climate crisis and what might happen to society in those kinds of extreme conditions, so it worked on this level. I definitely identified with the 'Eat the rich' politics that seemed to underpin the novel, given the propensity of the super-rich already to be buying up tracts of land in countries that are anticipated to survive better should the worst happen. I also thought the exploration of the link between food and sexuality was done well.

This book is too rambly for me. I did not get very far and could not continue with it to the end. It seemed to flick from one thing to another, none of it interesting.

If I had to sum up this novel in one word, it would be “unconvincing”. I couldn’t relate to it and in fact gave up at about 50% - I didn’t feel it was going to get any better. The premise is interesting, especially with our current climate crisis. For some reason a smog has started to cover the world causing mass extinction, crop failures and a consequent shortage of food. But fear not! An ultra-rich tycoon has the answer! He’s invested in a mountaintop gated community and is doing research into genetic engineering to save the planet. He hires our protagonist, an American young woman chef, to work for him to create fabulous dishes for him, his daughter and his cronies – a lack of ingredients doesn’t apply on the mountain. What follows are many descriptions of food and cooking, a sensuous feast for the senses, and in view of the state of the world, completely inappropriate. Perhaps rich character development as opposed to rich food might have redeemed the novel, but that is lacking too. Conversations and relationships are stilted and, well, unconvincing. The ending is, yet again, unconvincing. Overwritten, over-indulgent, too ornate – and lacking speech marks, which added to my irritation. I suppose it’s a novel for our time as climate change looms over us all – but there are better, more thought-out and yes, more convincing books out there.

I loved C Pam Zhang’s first book, so was very excited for this one. It’s completely different but quite incredible. It’s a really interesting plot, but the thing that stands out is the exquisite writing - I found myself rereading sentences in awe

This was a book that I just could not connect with, it was interesting, yes, but not one that I did enjoy. The only redeeming quality were the descriptions of food, which were absolutely sensuous.
Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for this advanced copy.

Land of Milk and Honey has been an interesting read. A story about a chef who keeps cooking even though the food production of the world is all but gone. The writing is nice and the storyline is engaging and interesting.

A rich book about a climate crisis and societal division. The world has been covered by smog, and small elite settlement have developed where food can be grown. The novel from the point of view of a chef that is invited to work for an ultra rich landowner on a gated and isolated Italian mountain.

There’s lots to love here: it’s rich and full of ideas, evocative descriptions, sensory - full of food and lust and suffocation.

A provocative picture of hedonism and deprivation. Great for book club as there’s loads to discuss!

Pick this book up if: you’re a fan of literary dystopian novels or want a ‘sad girl’ book with bigger themes

Thank you to NetGalley and the publishers for an ARC in exchange for my honest review.

In a near future world a smog has enveloped the planet leading to crop failures, mass extinction and food shortages. Our narrator is a chef who is offered a job in a private community of the ultra rich where she is drawn into the schemes of the owner and his daughter with life altering consequences.

This is one of the most atmospheric books I've read in a long time. It took me a little by surprise as I didn't anticipate such a dystopian edge but I loved that side of the story. The writing conjured a world which was claustrophobic, sinister, deliciously unsettling and incredibly sensual. The issues raised throughout the story were hugely topical and leave the reader with much to mull over though something of a sour taste at the state of the planet and humanity. It's an intense read for sure but never hard work. It had me totally gripped.

Smog has destroyed most of the world‘s crops and food has become scarce. A young chef joins a mysterious mogul in his mountain eyrie in Italy, where seeds and crops are brought back to life and rich food is plentiful. She builds a relationship with the mogul‘s charismatic daughter, but what happens when she is asked to give more than expected.

This book really made me think, covering dystopian themes of scarcity and greed at the end of the world. The descriptions of food made me hungry at times, and utterly revolted at others. There‘s a lot to think about in this book. (CW for animal cruelty)

A brilliant, ambitious and dazzling novel!! I’d enjoyed the author’s previous book but this, to me, reached a whole new level and I really savoured it. I’m a food lover and I love to cook, so the topic was highly compelling of course, but these complex, awful, human characters were the cherry on top. Loved it.

Started out promisingly but became a little ponderous for me.

I may have partly found it dull due to the subject matter. I am a food philistine with an unsophisticated palette. Long-winded descriptions of ingredients do little for a man who sees a Big Mac as the height of fine cuisine. Foodies may well love it.

Also, the dialogue is not written in inverted commas, which always causes me to feel an irrational level of annoyance.

I've got other books I'm really keen to get on to, so I've decided to jump ship as the style of writing isn't really for me.

C. Pam Zhang's debut novel, How Much Of These Hills Is Gold, was, for me, incredibly promising but uneven and overloaded. Despite its flaws, I wrote at the time: 'I’d much rather read something like this than a bland, competent book, and I’ll look out for more from Zhang.' So it's so great to read their second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, and find that it's clearly composed by a writer who's now absolutely in control of their craft, although I suspect Zhang's masterpiece is still to come. Land of Milk and Honey is set in a near-future where 98% of the world's food supplies have been destroyed by an unshiftable smog, which blocks sunlight and wreaks havoc with arable crops and animal life-cycles alike. Our narrator is a Chinese-American chef who's nearing thirty in a world where life expectancies have been dramatically reduced due to the air quality - her age group have been nicknamed 'The Mayfly Generation'. She takes a job at a mountaintop colony where the skies are clear and the rich continue to access the dishes of the past, from the bitter greens that our protagonist craves to the last remaining Bresse chickens and pastries heavy with real butter. Her employer seems to want her to step sexlessly into the place of his vanished Asian wife, but it's his adult daughter, Aida, whom she's drawn to.

This could be read as a simplistic moral rant about the greed of the rich - how there would be enough food to go round, even in this world, if they would only share, how disgusting it is for them to gorge themselves while the rest of the world subsists on mung-protein flour - but I think Land of Milk and Honey is more complex than that. Our narrator becomes complicit in this colony, and inspired by Aida's zeal, especially when Aida explains how her scientific work has already contributed to the world through developing 'a cultivar of mung beans that grow in the dark', the crop that has sustained the world through providing calories, if not taste, and how the Italian government confiscated their research and 'used our work to make another monoculture'. Aida's father is a kind of Elon Musk or Stockton Rush figure, blinded by his own belief in himself and his right to operate outside boundaries, but Aida's morals are considerably more interesting.

Zhang's writing is also, simply, stunning. This book reminded me of both Melissa Broder's Milk Fed and Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi's The Centre in its evocation of what we consume and when we go hungry, and there are set-piece chapters that just blaze out of the text: the opening chapter, a confrontation with a key investor, a 'slumming' trip to Milan for a bit of food tourism. The ending is unexpected in the best of ways; I always enjoy eco-dystopias that move away from being simply portents of doom, and Zhang achieves this beautifully. Where Land of Milk and Honey lost me slightly was in the bits in between its key moments, which tend to blur into a litany of dishes and desire, keeping the reader too distant. The way Aida was written crystallised these problems for me: she's a fascinating character, but I felt very little emotion towards her until very late in the day. The narrator is clearly reconnecting with her own self and perhaps some of this numbness is feeding through, and the last few paragraphs are incredibly moving, but I wish I could have been as mesmerised by this whole book as I was by its final chapters.