The Banquet of Esther Rosenbaum

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It is Berlin, 1929. The inflation-hungry city is edging towards disaster, but seven-foot, Jewish orphan Esther Rosenbaum is serving up chocolate hearts stuffed with saffron pen nibs. The bohemians, artists and cabaret composers who sample her finest recipes in the legendary Schorns restaurant, have declared her Germany's most celebrated chef. Yet it is a life built on quicksand: Schorns is owned by a gay black marketeer Leon Wolf - but patronized by Nazis. Now Esther, once a towering presence clad in her peacock tapestry skirts, has stopped eating and is reducing herself to bone, dressing as a man to blend into Berlin's vicious night streets. Using a burlesque brand of magic realism, Penny Simpson conjures fantastical elements to show how cookery can be an act of storytelling, and imagination itself an act of subversion and survival.