Sweetbitter

At twenty-two, Tess leaves a flat, forgettable life behind and arrives in New York City with almost nothing planned except the leaving itself. She talks her way into a job at a celebrated Manhattan restaurant, and the back-of-house world swallows her whole: the punishing rhythm of service, the coded language of wine and food, the after-hours drinking, and the intense, unspoken hierarchies among the people who work there.

Two of them come to define her education. Simone, an older, magnetic senior server, becomes a mentor Tess longs to impress and to become. Jake, beautiful and withholding, becomes an obsession. Between them, Tess learns to taste — and to want — with a new and dangerous intensity.

Stephanie Danler's Sweetbitter is a sensuous, finely observed coming-of-age novel about appetite in every sense: for food, for the city, for belonging, and for people who may not be good for you. It captures a particular year of early adulthood, when everything is vivid, precarious, and impossible to hold on to.