Happy book birthday to the mass market edition of RECIPE FOR A PERFECT WIFE by Karma Brown, out today from Penguin Canada!
#1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER
GLOBE AND MAIL BESTSELLER
TORONTO STAR BESTSELLER
TORONTO STAR BESTSELLING BOOKS FOR 2020
VANCOUVER SUN BESTSELLER
US INDIE BESTSELLER
A PENGUIN BOOK CLUB PICK
One of:
CBC’s “spring reading list: 40 great books to read this season”
The Globe and Mail’s “36 reads to get you through till spring”
New York Post’s “The best books of the week”
Refinery29’s “11 Books To Stay Inside With This Winter”
Barnes and Noble’s January “Books of the Month”
“It’s easy to keep turning the pages as we toggle back and forth between Alice and Nellie, who — breaking news — has a far more complicated life than a stack of Ladies’ Home Journals would lead Alice to believe. . . . And it turns out Nellie has a lot more to teach Alice about being a wife and a woman than how to bake a good batch of cookies. The most important? Take those trappings you resent so much — cooking, gardening, bearing children — embrace them, then wield them like weapons.” —New York Times Book Review
“A time-hopping, dark domestic mystery, sprinkled with a dash of female empowerment and a few vintage baking tips.” —Toronto Star
“Fans of Daisy Jones and the Six will take to this new novel about women taking control.” —The Globe and Mail
“Brown ratchets up the tension and pulls off a surprising—but satisfying—ending [in Recipe for a Perfect Wife]. An engaging and suspenseful look at how the patriarchy shaped women’s lives in the 1950s and continues to do so today.” —Kirkus
“Brown kills it; her latest is a winner so captivating that fans of modern and old-fashioned stories about women could easily read it in one day.” —Library Journal, starred review
“Hidden behind the veneer of a domestic novel, Recipe for a Perfect Wife doubles as a slow-burning thriller with a satisfying conclusion. Through her exploration of the past, Brown delivers a timely message about the state of marriage today, and the many ways in which women continue to fight for control over their future.” —Quill & Quire
When Alice Hale reluctantly leaves New York and a career in publicity to follow her husband to the suburbs, she is unaccustomed to filling her days alone in a big, empty house. But after she finds a vintage cookbook buried in a box in the old home’s basement, she becomes captivated by the book’s previous owner, a 1950s housewife named Nellie Murdoch. As Alice cooks her way through the past, she realizes that Nellie left clues about her life amidst the recipes–including a mysterious series of unsent letters penned to her mother.
Soon Alice learns that while Baked Alaska and Meatloaf Five Ways seem harmless, Nellie’s secrets may have been anything but. When Alice uncovers a more sinister–even dangerous–side to Nellie’s marriage, even as she grows increasingly dissatisfied with the mounting pressures in her own relationship, she begins to take control of her life and protect herself with a few secrets of her own.
Karma Brown is the bestselling author of five novels: the #1 bestseller Recipe for a Perfect Wife, Come Away with Me (a Globe and Mail Best Book of 2015), the Globe and Mail and Toronto Star bestsellers The Choices We Make and In This Moment, and The Life Lucy Knew. She is also the author of The 4% Fix: How one hour can change your life. A National Magazine Award-winning journalist, Karma has been published in Chatelaine, Canadian Living, SELF, Redbook, and Today’s Parent, among others. She lives just outside Toronto with her husband, daughter, and a labradoodle named Fred. Karma is represented by Carolyn Forde.