The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky

Rosa Achmetowna is the outrageously mischievous narrator of this rollicking saga, the story of three unforgettable women whose destinies are tangled up in a family dynamic that is at turns hilarious and tragic.

When Rosa discovers that her daughter Sulfia is pregnant, she does everything possible to thwart the pregnancy. Despite her best efforts, baby Aminat is born nine months later at Soviet Birthing Center Number 134. To Rosa's surprise and eventual delight, dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through and instantly becomes the apple of her grandmother's eye. Rosa wages an epic struggle to wrestle Aminat away from Sulfia, whom she considers a woefully inept mother.

When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye

of a sleazy German cookbook author researching Tartar cuisine, Rosa is quick to broker a deal that will guarantee all three women a passage out of the Soviet Union. But as soon as they are settled in the West, the uproariously dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter and grandmother begin to fray.

Alina Bronksy is the author of Broken Glass Park (Europa, 2010), The Hottest Dishes of Tartar Cuisine (Europa, 2011), which The Wall Street Journal, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly named a Best Book of 2011; and Just Call Me Superman (Europa, 2014).