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Book Cover for: Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity, Priya Basil

Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity

Priya Basil

The dinner table, among friends, is where the best conversations take place - talk about the world, religion, politics, culture and cooking. In the same way, Be My Guest is a conversation about all those things, mediated through the medium of shared food.

We live in a world where some have too much and others not enough, where immigrants and refugees are both welcomed and vilified, and where most of us spend less and less time cooking and eating together. Priya Basil invites us to explore the meaning and limits of hospitality today, and in doing so makes a passionate plea for a kinder, more welcoming realisation that we have more in common than divides us.

Book Details

  • Publisher: Canongate Books
  • Publish Date: Nov 5th, 2019
  • Pages: 128
  • Language: English
  • Edition: undefined - undefined
  • Dimensions: 7.80in - 5.20in - 0.70in - 0.50lb
  • EAN: 9781786898494
  • Categories: Anthropology - Cultural & SocialCustoms & Traditions

About the Author

Priya Basil was born in London to a family with Indian roots and grew up in Kenya. She is an author and essay-writer whose work has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is the co-founder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists. She lives in Berlin. priyabasil.com

Praise for this book

"An intimate, delicious and thought-provoking story, told with warmth, humour and generosity" NIGEL SLATER

"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