2008
Chef Jaspreet Singh
Novel
Winner of the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction.
Short-listed for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean
Short-listed for the 2008 QWF Hugh MacLennan Prize for Fiction.
Short-listed for the 2009 CAA Literary Award
Short-listed for the 2009 City of Calgary Prize
Chef is a compelling look at the India-Pakistan conflict.
Chef is a hypnotic novel that tells the story of the India-Pakistan conflict from the point of view of an apprentice chef who is posted to the base of the Siachen Glacier, the coldest battlefield in the world at 20,000 feet.
It is 2006, and President Bush has traveled to India to sign the controversial nuclear deal. Kirpal, a Sikh former military chef with a newly diagnosed brain tumor, is on his way from Delhi to Kashmir, returning after a fourteen year absence to cook his last official meal at the General’s residence. The occasion? The wedding of the General’s daughter, Rubiya, who has fallen in love with a Muslim man. During the long train and bus journey, Kirpal looks back over his days of culinary apprenticeship, as well as at the painfully tangled history of India and Pakistan. As he reflects on his own damaged life, and on the scarred history of his country, he remembers his relationships with his father, a military hero who died on the glacier years earlier, and Irem, a young Muslim woman from the wrong side of the border who “is a bit like garlic that has entered the pores” of his skin.
Written in prose that is by turns lyrical, lusty and mournful, this is a brave and compassionate novel of remembering and hope, set against the devastatingly beautiful, war-scarred backdrop of army-occupied Kashmir.
Jaspreet Singh’s debut fiction collection, Seventeen Tomatoes, won the 2004 McAuslan First Book Prize and has been translated into Spanish and Punjabi. Chef, his first novel, won the Georges Bugnet Award for Fiction, and was a finalist for the 2009 Commonwealth Prize for Best Book in Canada and the Caribbean, the Quebec Hugh MacLennan Prize, the Canadian Authors’ Association Literary Award, and the W.O. Mitchell Book Prize. He lives in Canada.
“Jaspreet Singh has the soul of a poet and the pen of a novelist. Chef is an intricate, subtle and beautiful book and it introduces a new note into Canadian literature.” – P.K. Page
Praise for Seventeen Tomatoes:
“Steeped in mournful affection for a war-scarred land and its peoples.” –Globe and Mail
“Jaspreet Singh’s prose flashes with poetic lyricism ... a haunting fairy tale.” –Montreal Gazette
ISBN: 978-1-55065-239-0