Bread Alone
A Novel
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- €9.49
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- €9.49
Publisher Description
For fans of Like Water for Chocolate and Woman on Top comes a deliciously magical and mouth watering story, filled with wonder, discovery, and new beginnings.
Thirty-one-year-old Wynter Morrison long ago gave up on finding a suitable career and drifted into the role of trophy wife to an ambitious advertising executive. After her husband decides that their marriage was a mistake Wyn leaves behind her posh, pampered life and ventures north to Seattle, spending aimless hours sipping coffee at a local bakery. As the sweet aromas of freshly-baked bread awaken memories of her apprenticeship at a French boulangerie, she feels the desire and ambition to bake bread once again.
Soon, Wyn finds--in the kneading of the dough and the scent of yeast hanging in the air--an unexpected and wondrous healing power that helps her to rediscover that nothing stays the same. Inspiring and beautifully rendered, Bread Alone is an uplifting debut novel guaranteed to warm the heart.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The First Wives Club acquires a junior member in this pleasant if unremarkable first novel. When 31-year-old Wynter Morrison finds herself locked out of her house by her handsome, spoiled husband, David, who has taken up with a beautiful blonde, she is devastated. With only three years' experience teaching high school, one year in real estate sales and seven years experience as the "Executive Wife" and "Charming Hostess," Wyn has little success fending for herself at first, but a growing self-awareness emerges slowly once she leaves her old lifestyle in Los Angeles. After visiting a friend in Seattle, Wyn moves there to take a job at a local bakery. No longer dependent on David, Wyn finds solace in living a spartan existence and working hard in the early morning hours baking bread, though she is frustrated by the unimaginative veteran baker. Her memories of a year abroad in Toulouse during her sophomore year at UCLA where she learned to bake bread in a family bakery are sprinkled throughout the story, as are her favorite bread recipes. Over the course of this long, convoluted tale, Wyn transforms from a "willfully ignorant," betrayed wife living in sunny L.A. whose greatest worry is what to wear to the next symphony ball, to a flannel shirt wearing bakery owner living in the rainy Northwest who finds love with a bartender-turned-writer. In this engaging novel, Hendricks creates a compelling narrator whose wry, bemused and ultimately wise voice hooks the reader. Even though Wyn's story is predictable at times, this is a well-written, imaginative debut.
