Catherine Kurtz

Steve Thomas: Catherine, welcome to Circulating Ideas. 

Catherine Kurtz: Hi, Steve. It’s fantastic to be here. Thanks for having me. 

Steve Thomas: So you’ve got a creative past. You’re a painter, a food writer, and now you’re a novelist. What drew you to wanna write a novel after your work in the food world and the art world?

Catherine Kurtz: I think I’ve always had a need to create, to express myself. I am a painter. I’m still a painter. I’ve done that since I was a kid and I went to art school. I’m represented by the Redfern Gallery in London, so that’s a parallel career to this writing. Like most creatives, like most artists, we have to make a living, and we have other things that we do.

I’m obsessed with food and always have been. I think I’ve always had a heightened awareness of food, so when I was thinking of other things to do, I used to cook for people. I’ve catered parties and done that kind of thing, and I met a magazine editor and started writing food pieces, and that went well, and I realized I could get a paycheck. So I started to write about food, and I met some people who were taste experts. Through that, discovered I had a good palate and started to judge food, judge chocolate in particular. I regard that as my day job. That’s my kind of side hustle, is the salaried stuff, the food stuff.

Writing fiction is really something I’ve been doing for quite a long time. Like most debut novelists it’s taken a while. I’ve been writing fiction, writing stories out of my heart and my soul for a while, and Feast is the first that did that magic thing of get me representation and an agent and publishing, but it’s really an extension in a way. It’s very different from my painting, but that’s the sort of fine artist part of me. I spend a lot of my working life alone in my studio, where I’m sitting now, with an easel at one end with a painting on it and a desk at the other where I write stories. And food was just, food’s a lifelong obsession, so to put a lot of food in a book was a kind of natural thing for me to do. 

Steve Thomas: Did your food writing and your painting, is there anything about those disciplines that shaped the way you constructed this story? 

Catherine Kurtz: I think so. That’s a good question. I think that this novel in particular, and not necessarily previous novels I’ve written, and probably not my next and stuff is full of the particular thing that is food. But I think I am altogether, and this is the painter in me, someone who has very heightened senses. I’m very aware of what I can see, sound. I write from my senses I think quite intensely, and always have done.

I also think the fact that I’m an art school kid, I went there rather than to university, that my approach to writing in general and writing a novel is a fairly singular path. Not unique, there are many other artists and many poets and people who aren’t necessarily English lit grads who write novels, but they’re my people in that I didn’t go to university. I have got a master’s now, in fact, which I’m very I’m proud of, but I went to art school, and when I started to write a novel, I did not know what I was doing. I didn’t have a rule book. I didn’t have a framework. I just was writing what I needed to write. And in the same way that art school in London didn’t have a “this is how you paint,” my journey to writing a full novel didn’t have a “this is how you write a novel and they’re structured like this.” And to this day, I’ve actually never read a book about how to write. I’ve now done a masters, which was run by other writers, so it was very much a practical course of ” write and find your voice by writing.” But I think that comes from me being a painter. I think that comes from me not knowing this is the right way to do it and just finding my own way. It’s very self-evolved for better or worse. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah. No, and you get that in the book. Everything is sense-oriented, like, all the descriptions of things really are sense-oriented, talking about it in terms of smells and tastes even when describing kind of other things, that’s how it’s always filtered through, it feels in this book.

So we don’t keep dancing around it, can you tell listeners a little bit about the book, about what the story is, and how you came to this particular story? 

Catherine Kurtz: Yes, absolutely. So Feast is a story about Mina a mixed race girl who is born with an extraordinary sense of taste. And it’s about what the world makes of her, and then ultimately what she makes of it. I wanted to explore what it means to be an unconventional woman in the world. I wanted to expose something about how society can treat people it deems different including those women and in many ways women all together.

So that was the genesis of it, this extraordinary sense being a kind of metaphor for someone who lives deep and is unconventional along with her race, if that makes sense. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, definitely. And all the relationships she’s in with her parents, her grandparents, various other people that she meets throughout her life, again, feels wrapped up in that… I’m gonna say “sensory burrito,” but that’s not really what the word I would wanna use, but just wrapped up together and….

Catherine Kurtz: Oh, I like that! I like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It’s all a meal with kind of too much in it, or lots in it, or hopefully very satisfying ultimately. I have had some early readers now have said that they’ve said “Product warning: don’t read while you’re hungry.” Because this book will make you hungry. 

Steve Thomas: Yes, absolutely!

Catherine Kurtz: And you’re right, not all the tastes and smells are good. You are quite deeply inside Mina when you read it and are experiencing everything through her senses. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, even the food and her senses, it’s not just about, oh, look at this delicious food, I’m gonna taste this delicious food now. They trigger memories. There’s different classes and statuses as to which food you can eat, and danger sometimes even, because part of the story is that then she’s smells some poison and prevents the local duke from being poisoned, and he brings her in as his poison taster.

Catherine Kurtz: Food is this magnificent universal subject. It’s something that we all, if we’re lucky, we eat every day. Each of us has food memory that matters to us profoundly, things that we don’t like, things that signify to us particular people, things that connect to our heritage, things that connect to new experiences. It’s a sort of basic daily need, but it’s also in every society and culture. And, fine food, which is very represented in France, and part of the book takes place in France, is high art almost.

So I think you can say an awful lot of things with food, and you can surely feel an awful lot of things through I was gonna say representing food, but hopefully it’s more than just representing it. It’s that’s the root of the story through which you’re finding out many things and experiencing it. 

Steve Thomas: And is that why you chose France as the location for the bulk of the story, because of that history of fine art of food, fine food art?

Catherine Kurtz: Fine food. Good question. No, partly, yes. I’ve had family living in France for most of my life. And so it’s somewhere I know and love. The setting in France, the Château de Belfales, that is a fictional château. It’s not a real château. I’ve made it for the story, but it’s definitely a composite of places that I know and that I have been and some of the atmosphere I’ve felt walking around those spaces through my life.

The book starts in London. Mina is born in London, and I grow up in London. I live just outside now. So I wanted to site the story in places that felt real to me so that I could evoke them well, but France as a location for fine food and the experiences she has as a taster for a duke at that time, the turn of the century, the turn of the late 1800s and into the beginning of the 1900s, there’s an explosion in development of the culinary arts in France, and so it’s very important. It’s very prestigious. To be frank, I couldn’t resist inventing some elaborate dishes and just letting myself and the reader savor them and their description. But yeah, a chef in France, there’s a chef in the book who is a sort of character and a half, and to me, he just had to be French. 

Steve Thomas: Mina’s gift is obviously very helpful, but it’s also a burden to her at times and makes her, as much as it’s a magical gift, it’s also sometimes makes her different and almost expendable. Like the duke, even though he’s generally nice, doesn’t ever say her name, just calls her poison taster, makes her just a thing, an object. They use her as entertainment even of just, “Oh, look at what she can do!” How did you approach writing that sort of, I guess that kind of wraps up a lot of the racial things in there as well, of exclusion and survival for her?

Catherine Kurtz: Thank you for noticing that. Yes. I think there are a couple of points there. You’re absolutely right. Especially thank you for noticing that they make her perform. That was quite deliberate. I think as somebody who was, for want of a better word and using a problematic word, “exotic” for them, the fact that they have her perform is is me trying to tell a particular story and a lived experience of many people.

Also, the same goes for being a woman and being a young woman, and her exceptional qualities, her gifts, her talents is another person’s entertainment, is going to be used and appropriated by the male figures in the story. There’s also just even a locational thing. She’s mistrusted by everyone because of her difference, and the location I put her in is a tasting room that is halfway down the stairs, so she’s not of the upper house. She’s not of the main chateau, the gilded place where the entertainments happen and they actually feast on these foods and please themselves. Nor is she really of the below stairs, where the chef is making the food but resents the fact that she gets to taste it first, where the other servants dwell.

So she has no belonging, and in a way I think, I hope that the story as a whole feels like a search for belonging. And I think importantly for me, being mixed race and my character is mixed race, I think the mixed race experience can often be one of not really belonging anywhere. And that’s played out in that role that she has. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, no, there’s only like a handful, two or three characters that she can really trust throughout the entire book, her entire life. Even her own mother can’t be completely trusted 100%. But none of them she can be with. Either she’s taken away from them or they’re taken away from her.

It’s always a sense of unrest with her, and I think that feeds into what you were talking about of that no sense of belonging ’cause you’re like, you don’t belong anywhere.

Catherine Kurtz: I think and hope that I don’t feel that life is bleak for her because I feel that her ability to live and savor is really an important characteristic of who she is but also the great love that she is given along the way. There are deep friendships and care that happen and that she is capable of too, and that she gives. But I think this goes back to being unconventional and having a big characteristic, like her sense of taste or being unusual in some way, that her own family are maybe not always at ease with her. But also she is brown, but her mother is white, and while her mother actually does bring her up and take care of her and put her in the safest place that she can think of, her mother keeps her safe. She puts her with her grandparents. So her mother does care for her, but she doesn’t understand her, and she’s anxious for her and about her. I think those things are very real in terms of differences between parents and children, being unconventional or unusual in some way and where does that sit?

She’s very young during the book. The book starts with her birth, and so the sort of passage of the journey to finding one’s place is what I wanted to show and the joys along the way as well as the difficulties along the way, and also the fact that it does happen, is precious to me.

Steve Thomas: There’s definitely dark periods because you wanna have a narrative arc obviously in the book, but even in the darkest times you don’t feel like she’s really given up. There’s maybe a very brief period when she might have that, but she quickly realizes that she needs to move on from a situation then. This is just toxic now. I can’t be here anymore. But it’s not, “I’m giving up.” It’s just, ” This is not my place. I need to go find my place.” And so I think she does keep that optimism about herself, and some of it is about, I think, always trying to find that home. So she’s I think, always searching for that, and then just ultimately it ends up these various places she tries out are just not that home. 

Catherine Kurtz: Not quite right. Yeah. Thank you for for noticing and acknowledging the hope in it.

For me, it was a very hopeful thing to write and full of hope. I think that, yes, I think somebody who is vibrant and open and alive and wants big things and has expectations or hopes their expectations of life will be met, I think sometimes you get missed. You go down the wrong path.

I do think that her spirit is challenged, and there are things that happen which that, no spoilers, that kind of show when it’s most greatly challenged. But I think you’re right. I think she removes herself. I think there’s a sense of self-preservation that remains there, and I think that actually the dark parts are really stuff that happens outside of her where the world is hard and where the world is good, and she moves towards the good things, and she has a survival instinct and an instinct to thrive.

Steve Thomas: There’s a part when she meets a young man who’s very nice to her, and you can see it, just anybody who’s been a teenager before, you could feel the, “Oh, she’s completely falling in love with him,” even though you can tell he’s just being nice to her. And she’s “Oh, he’s so sweet,” and, “He said he likes this, so that means he likes me.” And it’s “Oh, you’re going down the wrong path, girl.” But it’s so familiar, I think, to anybody who’s had the teenage crush, that’s just what happens. That’s one of those things that just made her feel real to me, that in particular.

Catherine Kurtz: Yes. She feels very real to me. I care about her a lot. I think that the reality of romantic feelings are yes, when you’re a teenager, is that it’s all hope and not much realism. I also think that when you’ve had to fall back on your own resources in life a lot, and you haven’t necessarily found security within family, then being liked by someone, being approved of, even if temporarily, being needed for something, is very compelling, and I think how compelling that is, was that part of the story for me. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, ’cause I don’t know that she’d ever been needed before in her life. She was wanted, and she was various things, but she’s never been completely needed. There were points when she maybe would’ve been, but she was very much needed in that point. And yeah, I think it, that’s just a good feeling for anybody of “Oh I’m needed to help this person.” 

Catherine Kurtz: Absolutely. Especially if they’re compelling, if the person is compelling or beguiling in some way. I think her mother needs her a lot at the beginning. She does a lot of caretaking, which is more to do with growing up fast than anything else. But that’s also maybe reflected in that later response, because in some ways, that’s an endlessly unsatisfied need when you want your parent to want you and maybe they don’t.

Steve Thomas: Yes. It is a very complicated relationship with her mother, and I agree, I wasn’t thinking about that, but yeah, I agree. That’s a need situation too, but the relationship is somewhat broken at that point. Her mother can take care of herself in certain ways, but I don’t think can in others. And that’s just a sad truth sometimes. 

Catherine Kurtz: She’s glamorous but not very practical.

Steve Thomas: In libraries a lot of times we’ll do readalikes, where we’ll read a book and then go, “Oh, what about these other books here?” And in food, the same thing of “oh, if you like this food, you can try this food.” If somebody read Feast, is there any food or any art or something in particular or another book that you would pair with Feast?

Catherine Kurtz: What a wonderful question!

Okay. I will have a few things to say. I’ll try and give you lots of things to savor. So the cover of the book, I want to shout out to my book cover because I think it’s beautiful. Berkeley did an amazing job, and it features a painting by Jan Davidsz de Heem, which is, I’m sure I pronounced that wrong because it’s the Netherlands. It’s so beautiful. Which is a 1643 Netherlands still life. He was an amazing painter of glorious feasts and kind of lush food and flowers and opulence. That painting is in the Wallace Collection in London, if you happen to be in London. But all together I think he’s worth seeking out, or that kind of era of this, that great era of still life, I think is a good parallel atmosphere to the novel.

I was very aware of Patrick Suskind’s novel, Perfume. I read that book when I was very young whenever it came out and loved it. It’s about a boy who’s born with an extraordinary sense of smell, and I reread that book about five years ago and very much reacted to rereading it thinking, “But what if this child was a girl?” And what if a woman wrote this? Because as a book, the outcomes of an exceptional other, rather set aside, rejected boy are very different than I think the world would do to a girl. And I also think it’s very evident that a man wrote that book, and so it’s a deliberate response to that book, so you may want to acknowledge or look at that.

But there are other things, there are some amazing foodie films. So Babette’s Feast, if you haven’t seen it, amazing film. The Taste of Things starring Juliette Binoche that was a few years ago, which is set in a chateau in France where Juliette Binoche plays the chef for the master of the chateau, and cooks. Pierre Gagnaire was the consultant chef on that film, and the food is real through that film. Is that enough? I could go on, I could go on. But yeah. Those are all really good foodie things!

Steve Thomas: I think that’s good. Is there a wine I guess you would pair with it?

Catherine Kurtz: Is there a wine? Actually, I’m not a big drinker at all, but in the novel I reference a vineyard called Clos Roche Blanche which did not at all exist at the time that the novel is set, but I’ve done a deliberate anachronism that I did, apologize to my proofreader, my copy editor, because it was the vineyard of a dear friend in the Touraine in France, Catherine Roussel. If you can get ahold of any Clos Roche Blanche, if there’s still any out there, unfortunately, Catherine died far too young. But yeah, I don’t know. I think for this book something full bodied and red probably.

Steve Thomas: Yeah, you mentioned that in the book, Mina is like you there, where she’s “Eh wine’s okay, but I’m not much of a drinker.” She doesn’t really drink wine that much either. 

Catherine Kurtz: I’m really not. I’m really not. My food obsession is chocolate.

Steve Thomas: Yeah I’m not really either. You sound like my wife in that regard. Give me chocolate all day long.

Catherine Kurtz: I genuinely do. I eat a lot of chocolate.

Steve Thomas: You had mentioned that vineyard, the anachronism that you had put in there, but you also mentioned that there was a certain type of strawberry that you wanted to include in the story that didn’t exist at that time. Can you tell listeners a little bit about that? 

Catherine Kurtz: I can absolutely tell you about that. From being in French markets, across my life, there is a particular kind of strawberry called Mara des Bois, which looks ordinary. It looks like a regular strawberry, maybe a little darker red, but basically like a regular strawberry and quite a kind of measly one. It’s quite small. But it’s not as tiny and unusual and I know that’s something different as say a wild strawberry, which look like teeny little things. But this particular strawberry is so fragrant and so special tasting, and it tastes like the best regular strawberry you’ve ever tasted with wild strawberry added to it, and they are amazing.

And every time they’re… i’m not sure the exact season, but I know I definitely have found them in July in markets in the Tourraine. And I have to buy two because we take one home to have that night, but I have to eat one while I’m walking around the market because I cannot resist them.

You can smell them, the scent of them sort of coils up to your nose, and they are just more delicious than pretty much any other fruit I’ve ever eaten, and I adore them. And they don’t travel, and they don’t last. They’re not like this bulletproof fruit we have in our supermarkets now. They are just amazing. So therefore, although it was a variety that wasn’t back then, they had to be there because I wanted to tell everyone about them, and I want everyone to, when they go to France, to seek out and eat that delicious thing.

Steve Thomas: We have some strawberry patches around here where you can go and pick and take home a bucket or whatever you want. That’s always a fun thing that we did with our kids, especially when they were little and that act of, and you talk about that some in the book, of Mina with her grandparents and then later with other characters of going out and actually picking the fruit yourself and eating it straight from the vine, and there’s something different about that, of having nice fresh fruit as opposed to what you, like you said, the bulletproof that has to be able to go on a container ship and then go three days across the Atlantic, but these things, yeah, the next day it’s gonna be bad. But, ooh, if you get it right off the vine…

Catherine Kurtz: Sun warmed, not refrigerated, sun warmed … just à point is the French phrase, just ripe. Just as it should be. In the UK around where I live in the middle of the countryside, blackberries are just a wild thing, so when they’re there, you walk along, you go for your walk, and you pick and eat as you go.

I do think that there’s an important experience that I hoped to write about around growing, food, picking food, experiencing it there, buying it even when she’s in a market, and buying it from the person who knows it and loves it. That’s just all part of the food being writ large for her and savoring it. There are some foods in the book that are over the top, and points where it becomes too much for her, but there’s a lot of it where it’s just a joyous experience. Her gift is a gift.

Steve Thomas: And you mention that several times when she’s being the poison taster where she’s having to taste a little bit of everything that, like you say, it’s a gift to be able to savor that food, but when you’re presented with just so much food over and over, it can be overwhelming ’cause if you had really good hearing and somebody’s blowing a horn in your ear, it’s too much, just can’t take it. And to the chagrin of the chef, she doesn’t particularly like a lot of the food that he makes.

Catherine Kurtz: No. It’s not great for his ego. And he has a very big ego. You’re right about it being like you have good hearing and it being too loud a horn. I think that it is exactly like that. She really experiences things deeply. They’re dialed up louder.

In some ways, I have some experience of wonderful things and managing that. I judge chocolate at an international level, and sometimes when you’re judging a competition and you have lots and lots of things and they’re exceptional. In that instance Mina has this responsibility to detect poison and to keep the duke safe, but I have a responsibility when I’m judging to really pay attention to each entrant’s example, their sample, because it’s their livelihood. You want to feed back the best possible responses and also judge it very accurately. There’s no sleeping on the job as a judge. There’s also no having “Oh, I don’t like that, so I’m not gonna…” You need to assess it for itself with great responsibility and care.

I do most of my judging now remotely. They come to me and I can pace them out. Because I’ve been doing that for a while. But when we used to judge more in person, and sometimes you have a very challenging day if you’re one of the more senior judges which I have been for a while, you might have 100 things. You might have so many, and if your palate stops being effective, you duck yourself out. It’s not fair on the entrants, and usually my palate holds up really well. My palate holds up better than my head.

Steve Thomas: And that’s difficult I’m sure because they are their own individual things, but they’re all chocolate at the end of the day, so there is a sameness to them, and you’re trying to pick out the dissimilarities, but especially 100 or whatever, yeah, I can’t even imagine naming 100 different types of chocolate!

Catherine Kurtz: There is an enormous variety of different flavor notes in fine origin chocolate. They can be really special and complex and unique. But also I, over the last few years, because of my head going with too much of the plain stuff, I judge more and more of the bonbons and different flavors and then there’s also a lot of technical considerations in terms of how they’re made and that kind of thing. But I’m very fortunate I get to try some of the best chocolates in the world.

I’m not a snob. I am not a chocolate snob and I’m not a food snob, because there is enormous nostalgia value in the things that we had as kids and in the candy that made us smile and that was a treat. And so I just put it in a different place. It’s like we can’t necessarily drink the finest wine every day. There are times where you just wanna kick back with an ordinary beer or whatever. You don’t necessarily want the finest bar or bonbon in the world every day. The other stuff has a different space in life and as a treat or a different kind of thing.

Steve Thomas: It’s always different ’cause my wife and I always say like the places where to get like the best hamburger and fries is like at a little hole in the wall, broken down little place at downtown Atlanta, back in the corner, and it’s $10 or whatever for your whole meal and you’re good to go. But you could go, yeah, get a $300 cheeseburger and specially cut potatoes and whatever at a fancy upscale restaurant. You might like them both, but they’re not the same thing and the one’s not better than the other. 

Catherine Kurtz: No, they’re just different. And I think for me, confectionery, which is what I would call those other chocolates that actually have relatively little cacao in them, I think they are nostalgia. I think they are the things that we had as kids. So if you’re in the States, that does mean Hershey bars. I was in the States for a little bit as a child and I remember Hershey’s Kisses quite fondly. I was talking to a friend about them today, in fact, so there you go. 

Some of those chocolates that are just milk chocolate bars but have very little in them and are mostly other fats and sugars and stuff they don’t taste so great to me, I have to be honest. They have to be the things that I had when I was a kid. Yeah. I love peanut M&Ms all day long.

Steve Thomas: The last thing I wanted to mention was just a small thing, but it does fit in very much with the story of peaches as well as being of one of her favorite foods, and it’s something that she has a memory with her grandfather about and fits in all kinds of other ways there, but number one, I live in Georgia, which is the Peach State, so we have lots of peaches around here. 

Catherine Kurtz: Lucky you!

Steve Thomas: But a peach I think is a really good food to have as an example of savoring a food because as long as you’re okay with getting all messy or whatever, you just bite into it. The skin is just crispy enough that you have to bite through it and then it… I don’t know, it’s just something about a peach to me really just illuminates the whole idea of savoring a food. 

Catherine Kurtz: Me too. Me too. I ate peaches in the south of France with my grandparents as a child throughout my childhood and young life, and they were many different varieties of peach, and they were subtly different, but they do have this purity. Because it’s this one fruit that has exactly as you described. It’s textural, the flesh itself, but also all the juice, and it has these honeyed flavors and they can have all sorts. Some of them are very almost just very clean and sweet with very little else but delicious, almost a bit watermelon-ish. But the really amazing ones in the south of France had a lot of kind of fruitiness and acidity along with the sweetness and honeyed notes and yet it’s just this one beautiful thing.

And they are very beautiful. They’re very beautiful. So I think the peach and the strawberries we talked about are at one end of the spectrum of a natural, beautiful food, and then at the other end in the book, there are these very elaborate dishes, and I really wanted to portray both of those things in her life and in her journey, and given that her experience of food is such an important part of the book.

In fact, the book begins with bread, which couldn’t be a simpler made food. So yeah, I think peaches are very special. 

Steve Thomas: Yes. Oh, and bread. Yes, bread can smell so good. And you do talk about also the combination, that taste is really more smell plus taste together is what you’re actually tasting. Your tongue is very basic on what it can actually taste, but it’s what you’re smelling as well.

Catherine Kurtz: That is something which as a taste consultant I’ve done a lot of teaching of, because if you, in a professional context of teaching people how to taste like a wine taster might, but I do it to chocolate tasters, you want to take the business of flavor apart, deconstruct it so people fully understand everything that they’re doing.

And that does include what it sounds like, what it looks like. But in terms of flavor, it really is a composite of your mouth and your nose. And in fact, the mouth is quite simple. There are five tongue tastes, but all the nuance, all the complex flavor notes, all the things that you would add to that, ’cause you don’t just taste a peach and say, “Oh, it’s sweet,” or if you’re a professional taster, you don’t. Or if you’re a professional wine taster, you have all of this other language. All of that is in your nose. And it’s infinitely complex.

There are so many potential flavors. And it’s actually so complex that you, the way to describe it, we use archetypes, so we use other flavors. You say, “Oh that was lemony and honey and this and that and the other.” ‘Cause they’re very difficult to describe. Scent is a very complex, very direct to emotion thing. Which is why flavor is nuanced and special. 

Steve Thomas: Yeah, but as you said at the beginning, I think it binds us all together because we all eat. We don’t all have Mina’s gift with being able to taste quite such a wide range of things. But it definitely is something, a common human experience that we all have together. 

Catherine Kurtz: Absolutely. And I think it’s universal, and I think that the reason I gave that to Mina is because really what she has is an amplification of what we all have so we all recognize it. I’ve just, for the purposes of storytelling, I’ve made something larger than life that hopefully we can all recognize and relate to and matters to everyone. 

Steve Thomas: Catherine, thank you so much for coming on the podcast, and thank you for writing such a lovely book. Like I said, I finished it last night before we started recording here, and I loved it. I was very… There’s exciting stuff that happens at the end that I’m not gonna spoil, but I was fearful for the characters and… I won’t even say if everything turns out okay. You gotta read it yourself. 

Catherine Kurtz: No spoilers. So I’m so grateful to you for this conversation and for reading it and also for what you said that you loved it. That means the world. That’s the greatest hope of a writer. It’s been brilliant talking to you and here’s to libraries. They matter. 

Libraries are our doorways onto kind of infinite worlds. They’re the places where we can most connect with each other from one room, I had school libraries that were really important. And as a kid, there was a new school library, and I was asked to make a wood engraving for the ex libris for the new school library, and I was very honored, but also most recently, in my research for things that I’m writing, I quite often use library archives or archives. And I I recently was very fortunate to have a visit, to pay a visit to Trinity Library in Dublin where I was shown some really special books for some research and incomparable kind of insight into times past and particular stories that wouldn’t exist.

But also just pulling a book off a shelf and finding something that you didn’t know you needed to know and then changes your life. That’s what you do every day, Steve, and that’s what libraries are for. So, go libraries! 

Steve Thomas: Listeners, you can find the book at your local public library, so check it out there, or your favorite booksellers. Catherine, thanks again so much, and I’m glad we were able to make this work with our vast time change across the Atlantic. 

Catherine Kurtz: Thank you so much, Steve. It’s been a pleasure talking to you.

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Steve Thomas: If you’re anything like me, you might need to pause the podcast at this point to grab a snack, because my tummy is definitely rumbling. So please press pause, grab a handful of fancy strawberries, and then come back to hear some Feast read-alikes brought to you from the Circ Desk with our friends from Novelist, Kendall and Lauren!

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Kendal Spires: Welcome back to The Circ Desk. I’m Kendal Spires, a NoveList librarian who does cataloging and collection development for the NoveList and core collections databases.

Lauren Campbell: And I’m Lauren Campbell, a NoveList librarian. I help create products and services aimed at readers, including professional development courses for Learn with NoveList.

Kendal Spires: We’ve just finished listening to Steve talk with Catherine Kurtz, so we wanted to share some readalike options for Feast. Lauren, would you like to start us off?

Lauren Campbell: I can. I’m gonna start us off with a readalike that we actually, Kendal and I both thought of this title immediately when we were reading about Feast.

Kendal Spires: Double stamp of approval.

Lauren Campbell: Double stamp of approval indeed. My first readalike is The Familiar by Leigh Bardugo. It was published in 2024. Set in Renaissance-era Madrid, The Familiar follows Lucia, a servant with a hidden gift for magic, milagritos or little miracles, that quickly spiral into something much more dangerous, when she’s pulled into the orbit of nobility and court politics. This is a historical fantasy with strong court intrigue, political maneuvering, and deeply personal stakes as Lucia realizes she wants to not just survive, but to really come into her power. There’s strong world-building, a tortured love interest, and well-developed side characters. In The Familiar, Bardugo delivers an intricately plotted story full of dark twists wrapped in this richly detailed, really atmospheric world. The Familiar leans more into fantasy, while Feast stays more rooted in historical fiction with just a touch of magical realism, but both have this kind of fairy tale feel to them, and there’s this shared focus on young women navigating these restrictive social systems.

I thought of this title as a readalike for Feast, like I said, almost immediately, because both of the main characters have a rare ability. Min has her sense of taste, and Lucia’s small magics, and both must deal with prejudice and suspicion. Min is ostracized for her race. Lucia must hide her Jewish heritage during the Spanish Inquisition. And both end up getting sucked into the world of nobility and used for those abilities.

The titles deliver that same atmospheric, richly textured experience, where you can almost taste the world-building. The Familiar adds a suspenseful, romantic edge, but maintains that same sense of careful, layered storytelling that Feast readers will appreciate. So if your patrons love Feast for its mood, its detail, its exploration of identity and power, The Familiar is a fantastic next recommendation even if it takes a slightly magical detour to get there.

Kendal Spires: No such thing as too much magic in my historical fiction personally.

Lauren Campbell: Agreed. Like Feast, my next readalike is a richly layered historical story with a touch of the extraordinary. The title is Every Rising Sun by Jamila Ahmed. This is a historical retelling inspired by One Thousand and One Nights, following a young woman who becomes a legendary storyteller using her voice and her stories to survive a dangerous political landscape. So again, think court intrigue, peril, a heroine who must be clever, observant, and strategic. In terms of NoveList story elements, this story is also atmospheric, evocative, intricately plotted. It’s a cinematic, immersive story with complex characters. And honestly, I found it as a readalike because I was playing around with some of the appeals that apply to Feast or that came to mind when I was reading more about it. Several times it was mentioned that Feast has almost that fairy tale-like quality, and it’s atmospheric, it’s evocative. So I started searching for some of our tags in NoveList, like adaptations, retellings, and spinoffs, paired that with atmospheric, because I thought that might get at that fairy tale vibe. I looked at historical fiction as well as genres and themes like court intrigue or political intrigue, because Min has to deal with the nobility and those court politics. And so I just mixed and matched and remixed a lot of those appeals. I went down the NoveList rabbit hole, as they say….

Kendal Spires: Happened to me too.

Lauren Campbell: Yeah, it’s a fun place to be. And then I stumbled on this one. It gave me that same kind of immediate feeling of “I wanna read it,” that Feast and The Familiar did. So in Feast, Min survives using her extraordinary sense of taste. In Every Rising Sun, our heroine survives through storytelling. Both are young women navigating dangerous hierarchical worlds where their unique abilities become tools for survival and power. Again, if you loved the atmospheric, the richly detailed historical setting of Feast, that sense of a woman carving out space in a world stacked against her, Every Rising Sun delivers a similarly evocative, high-stakes experience.

Kendal Spires: Those both sound great. My first pick also is pulling out, I think, a lot of those same themes and subjects that Lauren touched on. Mine is Hild by Nicola Griffith, which was published in 2013. This is also historical fiction. It’s also biographical fiction. It’s set in Anglo-Saxon England in the seventh century, and it follows a young girl named Hild, who was a real historical figure who we don’t actually know that much about, but she joins the court of her uncle, a pagan king, as Christianity is starting to move into Britain, and becomes one of his trusted advisors. There are basic similarities here with Feast and with some of our prior read-alikes, with a young woman pulled into a noble/courtly orbit due to her abilities. Hild has and gains a reputation as a seer, what she becomes very important in the court for. But she’s mainly just very smart and observant and becomes more of a political mover and shaker than Min does. So if you’re interested in a protagonist who takes a bit more power, that more foregrounds the courtly intrigue feel, has a bit more of a historical sweep, that’s what Hild is going to give you.

On the prose level, it’ll be a similar reading experience to Feast. These books share the atmospheric, the evocative, the richly detailed appeal. There’s historical fiction where the setting is less vivid, and there’s historical fiction more like what we have discussed here, where the author is really situating you in a past time and place, and these books are both doing that. So if your patrons like that about Feast and they want to try a setting that’s less trodden in fiction, the early Middle Ages, even farther in the past, and I think a little more alien to our modern sensibilities, they can give Hild a try for that.

Lauren Campbell: I love that this one also, it’s based on a real historical figure. It’s always a nice angle for me.

Kendal Spires: Yeah. I like those biographical fiction where we just don’t know that much, so they’re taking that as a jumping off point to do just whatever they want. And this one also has a sequel that came out fairly recently in 2023, I wanna say, so there’s more of it if you end up liking it.

Lauren Campbell: Ooh, nice.

Kendal Spires: Yeah. My second pick is a little more off the wall. I’m mostly going off vibes, and it is Lapvona by Ottessa Moshfegh, and that was published in 2022. This book is set in a kind of unspecified medieval time and follows Marek, who is a 13-year-old boy living in the titular village of Lapvona. Booklist describes this setting as a quote, ” grim sort of fairy tale place.” So there’s your fairy tale comparison again. We picked out a lot of the same things about this book.

Lauren Campbell: We really zeroed in on that fairy tale.

Kendal Spires: And Lapvona is besieged by plague and drought and the whims of a cruel lord. I stumbled onto this one just by playing around with the subjects and appeal that we have on Feast in the NoveList database. They’re both historical fiction. They have an evocative style, and they have a focus on social classes, again, with the nobility and commoners and peasantry. Same theme we’ve pulled out in some of these other read-alikes, being pulled into the service of nobility for one reason or another.

And with that evocative appeal, these books are both very much painting you a picture with the prose. Lapvona is grimmer in tone and more literarily unconventional, let’s say, in its structure and in its story. Ottessa Moshfegh in general is a little more boundary pushing, a little more into playing with grotesquerie as an author in general. So if the more provocative parts of Feast appealed to you, if you want a little more of that, then you can give this one a try.

I’ll be honest here, the main thing that drew me to this pick is that when I was searching in the database, these two books have very spiritually similar covers. Feast has a black background, a shadowy still life of food, neon pink text, and Lapvona has a black background, this shadowy painting of a motionless lamb, and neon blue text. And we always say, “Don’t judge the book by its cover.” And book covers do follow design trends as much as anything in pop culture does, but I do think the similarity of these covers speaks to the mood, at least, of these stories, and what about them the publisher wants to foreground when they’re marketing and trying to find these books’ readers. So little off the wall, but give it a shot.

Lauren Campbell: I definitely think you can sometimes tell a lot by a cover, and so I love that you matched those two together.

Kendal Spires: Sometimes it’s about vibes, and what is a cover but vibes?

Lauren Campbell: So that is it for us from the Circ Desk. We will check you out next time.