Be My Guest

Reviews / Votes

An intimate, delicious and thought-provoking story, told with warmth, humour and generosity -- NIGEL SLATER A powerful meditation on hospitality . . . Packed with such brilliance * * Observer, Best Food Book of the Year * * [Basil's] notion of "unconditional hospitality" could save the world . . . Her views are radical and persuasive, rooted in the knotty, sensual, frequently funny complexity of her peripatetic life . . . compellingly beautiful * * Financial Times * * The subject of food and its many-threaded associations - of generosity and privation, sharing and hoarding, diversity and denial, pleasure and fear - is the starting point for this absorbing meditation on the interface of self with other in contemporary Europe. Priya Basil writes with honesty, clarity and wit about what it means to be hospitable in a culture of selfishness, and the problems and possibilities of commonality -- RACHEL CUSK A brave and beautiful exploration into food, race, memory and the very meaning of life. I read it greedily - and so will you -- MEERA SODHA Be My Guest is a great essay on food and hospitality, on the act of sharing meals together, of family and of migration. It uses food and feeding guests and ideas of hospitality to ask bigger, wider questions about the precariousness of immigration and the inhospitable times we find ourselves in. Beautifully, deliciously written -- NIKESH SHUKLA A nourishing celebration of global culture and creeds [and] a thoughtful reflection . . . Written with poetry and heart, Basil manages to unite huge themes that affect us all while capturing the beauty of sharing * * Stylist * * Reading this rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party. The food is mouth-watering . . . but just as nourishing is the conversation, which embraces hospitality in its many guises . . . irresistible * * Observer * * Really rather wonderful . . . [A] warm gem of a book -- JACKIE MORRIS A candid, often very funny, insightful look at food and the complexity of hospitality - a brilliant book -- JENNY LINFORD * * author of The Missing Ingredient * *