Full Description
"Enjoy your homes. Enjoy your food. There is nothing that can take their place."
Half a world away from her home in Manitoulin Island, Ethel Mulvany is starving in Singapore's infamous Changi Prison, along with hundreds of other women jailed there as POWs during the Second World War. They beat back pangs of hunger by playing decadent games of make-believe and writing down recipes filled with cream, raisins, chocolate, butter, cinnamon, ripe fruit—the unattainable ingredients of peacetime, of home, of memory.
In this novelistic, immersive biography, Suzanne Evans presents a truly individual account of WWII through the eyes of Ethel—mercurial, enterprising, combative, stubborn, and wholly herself. The Taste of Longing follows Ethel through the fall of Singapore in 1942, the years of her internment, and beyond. As a prisoner, she devours dog biscuits and book spines, befriends spiders and smugglers, and endures torture and solitary confinement. As a free woman back in Canada, she fights to build a life for herself in the midst of trauma and burgeoning mental illness.
Woven with vintage recipes and transcribed tape recordings, the story of Ethel and her fantastical POW Cookbook is a testament to the often-overlooked strength of women in wartime. It's a story of the unbreakable power of imagination, generosity, and pure heart.
Contents
Table of Contents
Prologue: Setting the Table
I. Meeting the Emperor
1. What's a Manitoulin Girl Doing in
Singapore?
2. The Tiger Woman
3. Bon Voyage Photos
4. Stepping Out in Singapore
5. Guns, Bicycles and Spies
6. Loaded to the Hilt on Benzedrine
7. Silence of the Guns
II. Getting to Hunger
8. The Road to Jail
9. On the Inside
10. Shopping for Food and Answers
11. Shop for Some Pumpkins in Stall 38
12. The Logic of a Dream
13. Recipes of Longing
III. Dreaming it Up
14. Stitching Stories
15. The Red Cross Silence Hut
16. The Games People Play
17. Double Tenth
18. Descending Mania
19. Solitary Confinement
IV. Breaking Out
20. Shameful Hunger
21. First Feasts
22. The Horrors of Health Care
23. Is this Home?
24. Never Enough
25. The Gift of Food
V. Putting it all Together
26. Not Fit Company for Herself
27. Treasure Van
28. What's in the Bottom Drawer?
29. A Forgiving Spirit Draws Two Worlds Together
Notes
Index
