My sister-in-law handed me this book this past summer and said she thought I might like it. I ADORED it. It's the first and only novel by a Vietnamese woman writer -- born in Saigon in 1968; moved to USA when she was 6 years old. She published it in 2003; I am salivating in anticipation of her next book. This one tells the story of Binh, a Vietnamese cook who is exiled from Saigon and lands in Paris in the 1920s where he is eventually engaged as cook to Alice Toklas and Gertrude Stein. The book is a novel of ideas -- it's about class, race, nationality, sexuality, language, exile, identity, fame -- yet it's never didactic about those ideas; instead, it's emotional, poetic and incisive -- and there's amazing writing about food.