The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine

"In this acidly funny novel" of life in Soviet Russia, "a cruel comic romp ends as a surprisingly winning story of hardship and resilience" (The New Yorker).

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year

A German Book Award Finalist

A Huffington Post and Wall Street Journal Favorite Read of the Year

When Rosa Achmetowna discovers that her seventeen-year-old daughter, Sulfia, is pregnant, she tries every bizarre home remedy there is to thwart the pregnancy. But despite her best efforts, the baby girl Aminat is born--and immediately wins Rosa's heart. The dark-eyed Aminat is a Tartar through and through, just like Rosa, and the devious grandmother wastes no time in plotting to steal her away from the woefully inept Sulfia.
When Aminat, now a wild and willful teenager, catches the eye of a sleazy German cookbook writer 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 dysfunctional ties that bind mother, daughter, and grandmother begin to fray.


About the Author
Alina Bronsky's first novel, Broken Glass Park, was a finalist for one of Europe's most celebrated literary awards, the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize. It was hailed by Publishers Weekly as a "riveting debut," while the Boston Globe described it as "a vivid depiciton of contemporary adolescence under pressure." The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine, nominated for the prestigious German Book Prize, is her second novel. She lives in Germany.

Tim Mohr is a former Berlin club DJ whose previous translations include Broken Glass Park, Charlotte Roche's Wetlands, and Dorothea Dieckmann's Guantanamo, for which he won the Three Percent award for best translation of 2007. He collaborated with Duff McKagan on It's So Easy (and other lies), McKagan's forthcoming memoir.