PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction
Delicious Foods: A Novel
A novel set against a prison-like farm and a collapsing family, tracing how exploitation and violence erode personal dignity. Multiple narrators intersect in a story that combines pain with an unsettling, dark wit.
Work Information
A harrowing, unsettling novel about exploitation and family breakdown.
Through the voices of a mother trapped by exploitation and the son searching for her, the novel exposes the reality of violence and dependence. It blends allegorical strangeness with the urgency of social fiction.
Review Summaries
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Readers value the novel’s sharp social critique, narrative momentum, and distinctive unsettling voice. Some find its structure and heavy subject matter challenging, but it is widely seen as a book that leaves a strong afterimage.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Little, Brown and Company
- Published
- 2015-03-17
- Pages
- 384 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 16.51 x 3.18 x 24.13 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780316284943
- ISBN-10
- 9780316284943
- Price
- 4091 JPY
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction/United States/Black & African American
Held captive by her employers -- and by her own demons -- on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival. Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace. Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there. In Delicious Foods , James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor. The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.
James Hannaham is the author of the novel God Says No , which was honored by the American Library Association. He holds an MFA from the Michener Center at the University of Texas at Austin, and lives in Brooklyn, where he teaches creative writing at the Pratt Institute.
Reviews
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Version anglaise
Je ne savais pas que c'etait en anglais , puis je l'echanger contre une version en français ?
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Marvelous new author! Alert.
Life does not have to be nice, as this story reflects. This book grabs one and hardly let's go! It is cruel and chilling in part and those parts absorb the reader. Here is a terrific young author, James Hannaham, who we are going to hear about, and readers will wait for his next book, too. Some parts of this book tear at your heart plus cause you to think of the happenings long after you have closed the book for the night. The location of this produce farm in some-where South was like a prison. The people held there were brain washed to the point of belief that they needed to adopt the dreadful life the bosses handed out, day-to-day. Their ties were strong to the cause with little pay, drugs, and alcohol. It is unreal how those pathetic employees adapted to the horror handed out. They almost begged to be mishandled and fell right into line for the chicken-house life they lived. So sad but honest in what they marched to every day. It is a moving tale of human neglect. The characters are fascinating and simple, even the tie in with "Scotty" who had a very strong hold on Darlene. Marvelous read! Loved the book but not the ugly story! Beautiful in many ways yet heartbreaking side roads.
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Five Stars
Excellent condition
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Super read
This starts shockingly and continues to unravel the sad trail of events that drag people with nothing even further down. The joy comes with an unlikely child and the next generation.
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Unusual
The « Delicious Foods » of this novel is a company out of hell and its workers are living a nightmare at the hands of a ruthless boss and a sadistic foreman. Thanks to James Hannaham’s terrific writing this novel is a tour de force : a story about racial injustice, about people who have reached rock bottom and whose only solace is drugs, about a woman who can’t get over the murder of her activist husband and her son who tries to save her, about people who have given up all hope and are resigned to live as slaves and those that are willing to fight for their freedom