WHEN THE SECRET
INGREDIENT IS ... MAGIC
 
 
FICTION WITH FOOD AND A LITTLE BIT OF ... MAGIC
 
The Sugar Queen

by Sarah Addison Allen

Quiet, awkward Josey Cirrini's peaceful life -- caring for her elderly mother, enjoying romance novels, and indulging in her secret passion for sweets -- is turned upside down when Della Lee Baker, a sassy, confident, and bold waitress fleeing an abusive boyfriend, decides to hide out in Josey's home.
 
The Never-Open Desert Diner

by James Anderson

Ben Jones is an honorable but down-on-his luck truck driver on a lonely Utah highway. His life takes a sudden turn into violence, mystery and longing upon finding a beautiful woman playing a cello in an isolated house in the high desert.
Gourmet Rhapsody

by Muriel Barbery

A great food critic who can make or destroy the reputation of a chef with a stroke of his pen, Pierre Arthens faces his imminent death by trying to recall the one perfect flavor he sampled in his youth, a flavor that he believes forms the ultimate truth of his life.
The School of Essential Ingredients

by Erica Bauermeister

Follows the lives of eight students who gather in Lillian’s Restaurant every Monday night for cooking class. It soon becomes clear, however, that each one seeks a recipe for something beyond the kitchen.
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

by Aimee Bender

Rose Edelstein, a girl at the periphery of schoolyard games and her distracted parents' attention, bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the cake. She discovers this gift to her horror, for her mother -- her cheerful, good-with-crafts, can-do mother -- tastes of despair and desperation.
 
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Like Water for Chocolate : a Novel in Monthly Installments, With Recipes, Romances, and Home Remedies

by Laura Esquivel

Set in turn-of-the-century Mexico, it tells the romantic tale of Tita De La Garza, the youngest of Mama Elena's three daughters, whose fate, dictated by family tradition, is to remain single so that she can take care of her mother in her old age. 
The Chocolate Thief

by Laura Florand

The Parisian sorcerer of artisan chocolate, handsome Frenchman Sylvain Marquis, and the American empress of chocolate bars, Cade Corey, play a decadent game of seduction and subterfuge that causes them both to melt with desire. 
The Things We Do for Love

by Kristin Hannah

Life lessons. Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa's death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. 
 
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One Less Problem Without You

by Elizabeth M Harbison

Three women suddenly find themselves together at their own very different crossroads. It will take hope, love, strength and a little bit of magic for them to find their way together.
Chocolat

by Joanne Harris

When the beautiful and mysterious Vianne moves to Lansquenet and opens a chocolate shop across from the church, the inhabitants of the tiny village find themselves torn between the solemn law of religion and the joyful rewards of Vianne's confections.
Edible Stories : a Novel in Sixteen Parts

by Mark Kurlansky

These linked stories reveal the bond that can hold people together, tear them apart, or make them become vegan: food. Through muffins or hot dogs, an indigenous Alaskan fish soup, a bean curd Thanksgiving turkey or potentially toxic creme brulee, a rotating cast of characters learns how to honor the past, how to realize you're not in love with someone any more, and how to forgive.
The Glass Kitchen : a Novel of Sisters

by Linda Francis Lee

Portia Cuthcart never intended to leave Texas. Her dream was to run the Glass Kitchen restaurant her grandmother built decades ago. But after a string of betrayals and the loss of her legacy, Portia is determined to start a new life with her sisters in Manhattan . . . and never cook again.
Natalie Tan's Book of Luck & Fortune

by Roselle Lim

Inheriting her grandmother's restaurant in a crumbling San Francisco Chinatown neighborhood, Natalie Tan is advised by the local seer to prepare three recipes from her grandmother's cookbook to help their struggling community. 
 
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The Wedding Bees : a Novel of Honey, Love, and Manners

by Sarah-Kate Lynch

Every spring Sugar Wallace coaxes her sleepy honeybee queen -- presently the sixth in a long line of Queen Elizabeths -- out of the hive and lets her crawl around a treasured old map. Wherever the queen stops is their next destination, and this year it's New York City.
The Hundred-foot Journey

by Richard C. Morais

Born above his grandfather's modest restaurant in Mumbai, Hassan Haji first experienced life through intoxicating whiffs of spicy fish curry, trips to the local markets, and gourmet outings with his mother. But when tragedy pushes the family out of India, they console themselves by eating their way around the world, eventually settling in Lumiere, a small village in the French Alps.
 
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The Witches of Cambridge

by Menna van Praag

Estranged from her beloved fellow witches by secrets, art-history professor Amadine wishes that her empathic abilities could extend to the mind-reading gift of her student, Noa, who considers her powers a curse and takes a reckless chance to get rid of them.
 
Eat Cake

by Jeanne Ray

Ruth's greatest comfort is baking cakes - and she's doing even more of it now that her husband has lost his job; her estranged father, a piano player (think hotel lounges) shatters both wrists and comes to stay with her; her mother, who lives with Ruth and her family, hates her father; her 16-year-old daughter thinks it is all just too much.
The Love Goddess' Cooking School
by Melissa Senate

When Holly Maguire inherits "Camilla's Cucinotta," her late grandmother's home-based Italian cooking school in Blue Crab Island, Maine, twelve of the sixteen students for the upcoming fall class drop out. After all, Holly isn't a seventy-five-year-old Milanese love goddess, whose secret sauces had aphrodisiac properties and whose kitchen table fortune-telling often came true. Holly, a broken-hearted thirty-year-old who's never found her niche, can barely cook at all.
Kitchens of the Great Midwest
by J. Ryan Stradal

Eva Thorvald is just a baby when her mother leaves and her father dies. But despite never really knowing her chef father and sommelier mother, Eva finds out that cooking is in her blood.
 
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Midnight at the Blackbird Café

by Heather S Webber

After the death of her beloved grandmother, Anna Kate travels to Wicklow, Alabama to settle her estate and sell the café she ran, but finds herself drawn to the quirky town and the mysterious blackbird pie everyone is talking about.