An idiosyncratic cookbook for the culinary enlightenment of mind and heart, combining perceptiveness with compassion and wisdom with sensuousness-for whenever we feel overwhelmed by our humanity A book of ambiguous genre and delicate, playful wisdom, Recipes for Sad Women is not a novel and not a cookbook. But should you wish to know what food to prepare in the case of sobbing or of nervousness, what the closest thing to dinosaur meat is (and therefore the best remedy for guilt), or what to eat when you are perfectly healthy and enjoying reciprocated love, you will find no better collection of recipes on the market. An acclaimed novelist, essayist, journalist and translator, Abad's eccentric, sensual and wry guide is neither unserious, nor entirely plausible in its advice. Elegant, melancholic, funny and full of morsels of insight, it is deftly and movingly instructional on the proper appreciation of sadness. I store up what I have read by Hector Abad like spherical, polished, luminous little balls of bread, ready for when I have to walk through a vast forest in the night-time. --Manuel Rivas This is a book that quietly knows what it is to be human, and to bridge, or reconcile, the gap between body and mind.--Nick Lezard, Guardian A passion for romantic Borgesianism will be satisfied by Hector Abad's Recipes for Sad Women, cute vignettes which address a darker sadness' --Nick Lezard, Guardian Books of the Year 2012 Hector Abad was born in Medellin, Colombia, in 1958. He was twelve when he wrote his first stories, going on to win the 1980 Colombian National Short Story Prize at just twenty-one. In 1987 his father was murdered by paramilitaries, and Abad was forced to flee to Italy. While in exile he published his first book, Malos Pensamientos (1991) but it was only upon returning to Colombia in 1993 that he became a fulltime writer. His autobiographical Oblivion: A Memoir has recently become available in English.