The Taste of Longing, Suzanne Evans
The Taste of Longing, Suzanne Evans
List: $18.99 | Sale: $13.29
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The Taste of Longing
Ethel Mulvany and her Starving Prisoners of War Cookbook

Author: Suzanne Evans

Narrator: Gwenlyn Cumyn

Unabridged: 10 hr 54 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: ECW Press

Published: 08/15/2021

Synopsis

Half a world away from her home in Manitoulin Island, Ethel Mulvany is starving in Singapore’s infamous Changi Prison, along with hundreds of other women jailed there as POWs during the Second World War. They beat back pangs of hunger by playing decadent games of make-believe and writing down recipes filled with cream, raisins, chocolate, butter, cinnamon, ripe fruit—the unattainable ingredients of peacetime, of home, of memory.In this novelistic, immersive biography, Suzanne Evans presents a truly individual account of WWII through the eyes of Ethel—mercurial, enterprising, combative, stubborn, and wholly herself. The Taste of Longing follows Ethel through the fall of Singapore in 1942, the years of her internment, and beyond. As a prisoner, she devours dog biscuits and book spines, befriends spiders and smugglers, and endures torture and solitary confinement. As a free woman back in Canada, she fights to build a life for herself in the midst of trauma and burgeoning mental illness.Woven with vintage recipes and transcribed tape recordings, the story of Ethel and her fantastical POW Cookbook is a testament to the often-overlooked strength of women in wartime. It’s a story of the unbreakable power of imagination, generosity, and pure heart.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Alexander on September 10, 2020

"However, it was not lost on any of them, even the little ones, that no matter how energized and colourful Aunt Ethel appeared, a strange sadness hung about her. Who but Ethel would sit among the trailing vines in the vegetable garden and eat every last sweet green pea yet never be able to fill the......more

Goodreads review by Bob on November 16, 2020

Gripping, sensitive biography of a generous, creative, forceful, bipolar woman from Manitoulin Island who met her future husband in 1933 on a ship from Shanghai en route to Singapore when she fell ill and he responded to a call for a doctor. He persuaded her to discontinue her world trip examining e......more

Goodreads review by Becky on June 08, 2020

First sentence: Ethel pulled on the lumpy blue coat she’d been given by the Red Cross and glanced in the mirror before heading out to the printer’s. There was nothing she could do about the coat’s ugliness, but the garment was hers and not much else in the world was. Just over a year before, on an u......more

Goodreads review by Saswati on July 16, 2020

The Taste of Longing by Suzanne Evans is a wonderful testimony of the human spirit’s ability to rise above one’s situation through creativity, imagination and the will to live. This true story of Ethel Mulvany from Manitoulin Islands, is a fascinating record of a Canadian woman who sees the world tha......more

Goodreads review by Kali on August 01, 2020

The Taste of Longing By Suzanne Evans It is no secret that I am a sucker for a good book cover. The cover of this book was off-putting for me. It seemed to indicate a dry read. It is a beautiful rendering of the subject of this biography, Ethel Mulvany, but I think it would be more marketable if it we......more

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