Hungry Hearts

Hungry Hearts Row is a street of food shops where magic runs through the cooking and the answers to hard questions are kneaded, rolled and baked. Here the usual greeting asks whether a person has eaten yet.

The book follows several people who come to the Row with something at stake. A shy teenager who works at her family's pasteleria tries to say what she really feels through the confections she makes.

A tourist from Montenegro hunts for a magic soup dumpling that might cure his fear of death. An aspiring chef enters a cooking competition, because the prize money could save his mother's life, and learns that butter and soul are what the dish needs.

The book is a collection of interconnected short stories by three authors, Caroline Tung Richmond, Elsie Chapman and Sandhya Menon. Each story is a self-contained piece, and together they share one setting. Contemporary life mixes with touches of magic throughout.

Food carries meaning well beyond nourishment in these pages. It stands for love and despair, for family and culture, for belonging and home. Reading it is like moving from one kitchen to the next, with a different person and a different hunger at each stop.