The Theoretical Foot

Description

Susan Harper and Joe Kelly, in love and hitchhiking through Europe, never want this perfect, passionate summer to end. It is the late 1930s, and society frowns on the slack morals of couples living in sin. But these tiresome strictures are swept away when they arrive at La Prairie, the elegant haven on Lake Geneva where Joe's enigmatic friend Sara and her lover Tim preside - where judgement is suspended and time ebbs deliciously away. Surrounded by orchards heavy with plums and meadows splashed with poppies, lunches are long, youth is languorous and wine flows. As morning gives way to afternoon and sunset brings the evening's festivities, the unseen tensions and desires of the group are revealed, the fleeting yearnings and long-held resentments. A long lost gem by one of the twentieth century's most iconic food writers, this previously unpublished novel illuminates moral attitudes in the 1930s and shows glimpses of a refugee-filled Europe blighted by the rise of Fascism and the menace of another war. Enchanting, light, yet suffused with the darkness of what is to come, The Theoretical Foot is a witty and bold portrait of a bohemian life under threat.

Author description

M.F.K. Fisher is credited with inventing American food writing and was one of its preeminent figures of the twentieth century. Following her acclaimed debut, Serve It Forth, her classic, Consider the Oyster, was published in 1941. She went on to publish over twenty-five books celebrating and interrogating food, love, and the sensuous life. M.F.K. Fisher's body of work encompasses essay collections, short stories, memoirs, journals and one other novel, Not Now But Now. Born in Michigan in 1908, she spent three formative years in France before settling in California. She died in 1992. mfkfisher.com/