Delicious Foods - Hardcover

Advance praise for DELICIOUS FOODS:

"James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival."-- Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad

"A tender, funny tour of a mind struggling to do the right thing. A revelatory and sympathetic guide to a misunderstood world." Steve Martin"

"GOD SAYS NO is a book that was desperate to be written but well out of reach. And then James Hannaham came along and wrote it, with the kind of care, wit, sympathy and fury that the book deserved. Imagine Candide . . . okay, imagine Candide as a black man, a southerner, a Christian fundamentalist, middle-class, obese, married, a father, and utterly, even profoundly gay. If a comedy, in the classical sense, is a story then ends in a marriage, and a tragedy is a story that ends with a death, then what do you call a book that ends with a split and a resurrection? A truly daring first novel, and something to read." Jim Lewis"

Advance praise for DELICIOUS FOODS:
"James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival."-- Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner for A Visit from the Goon Squad

"Delicious Foods is a strange and compelling American horror story, arrived at through fresh narrative strategies. A mother, a son, drugs, workers enslaved in a gruesome nightmare, love and survival--this is a wonderfully conjured novel."
"Daniel Woodrell, "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Maid's Version" and "Winter's Bone"
""

Praise for GOD SAYS NO, Hannaham's first novel (McSweeney's, 2009):
"As familiar as this setup might seem from a dozen shame-drenched political press conferences, Hannaham shifts the trajectory in an unpredictable story that zigzags from the Atlanta avant garde theater scene to a religious reparative therapy program called Resurrection Ministries, where men like Gary struggle to purge their sinful desires . . . GOD SAYS NO follows as that drama unfolds in original, startling ways."--"Salon "
"A tender, funny tour of a mind struggling to do the right thing. A revelatory and sympathetic guide to a misunderstood world."--Steve Martin
""Delicious Foods" is a strange and compelling American horror story, arrived at through fresh narrative strategies. A mother, a son, drugs, workers enslaved in a gruesome nightmare, love and survival--this is a wonderfully conjured novel."
"Daniel Woodrell, "New York Times" bestselling author of "The Maid's Version" and "Winter's Bone"
""

"Delicious Foods is virtuosity on a hire wire--a wild, romping, brilliant plot, capped off with bodacious characters and breathtaking prose. A completely unforgettable, original, and singular novel by a brave, exciting new writer."
"Tayari Jones, author of Silver Sparrow""

"This is a book of astonishing originality and power. In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham has created a wholly new world--a hallucinatory place shot through with struggle and terrible deeds--but one never lacking light or hope. Hannaham reinvents the Southern gothic with prose at once brutal and lyrical and drop-dead gorgeous. This is a hell of a novel."
"Dave Eggers, author of A Hologram for the King and The Circle""

"James Hannaham's new novel is a tour de force. Gripping, haunting, and deeply moving, it beguiles the reader with the urgent immediacy of its characters' lives, while also reverberating with universal themes of freedom and enslavement, love and survival." "Jennifer Egan, Pulitzer Prize winner for "A Visit from the Goon Squad"
""

WINNER OF THE 2016 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION

WINNER OF THE HURSTON/WRIGHT LEGACY FICTION AWARD

FINALIST FOR THE 2016 DAYTON LITERARY PEACE PRIZE

FINALIST FOR THE LOS ANGELES TIMES PRIZE FOR FICTION

NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR: New York Times, Washington Post

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR, Kirkus, BuzzFeed, National Post, Kansas City Star

TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Publishers Weekly
TOP 15 BOOKS OF THE YEAR: BookPage

Held captive by her employers--and by her own demons--on a mysterious farm, a widow struggles to reunite with her young son in this uniquely American story of freedom, perseverance, and survival.

Darlene, once an exemplary wife and a loving mother to her young son, Eddie, finds herself devastated by the unforeseen death of her husband. Unable to cope with her grief, she turns to drugs, and quickly forms an addiction. One day she disappears without a trace.

Unbeknownst to eleven-year-old Eddie, now left behind in a panic-stricken search for her, Darlene has been lured away with false promises of a good job and a rosy life. A shady company named Delicious Foods shuttles her to a remote farm, where she is held captive, performing hard labor in the fields to pay off the supposed debt for her food, lodging, and the constant stream of drugs the farm provides to her and the other unfortunates imprisoned there.

In Delicious Foods, James Hannaham tells the gripping story of three unforgettable characters: a mother, her son, and the drug that threatens to destroy them. Through Darlene's haunted struggle to reunite with Eddie, through the efforts of both to triumph over those who would enslave them, and through the irreverent and mischievous voice of the drug that narrates Darlene's travails, Hannaham's daring and shape-shifting prose infuses this harrowing experience with grace and humor.

The desperate circumstances that test the unshakeable bond between this mother and son unfold into myth, and Hannaham's treatment of their ordeal spills over with compassion. Along the way we experience a tale at once contemporary and historical that wrestles with timeless questions of love and freedom, forgiveness and redemption, tenacity and the will to survive.