Some authors can make us feel hungry with words alone, vividly describing dishes that will make your stomach rumble. Food in books often has a symbolic meaning, too, used to express love, gain favour, create a sense of comfort or explore cultural identity.

Taiwan Travelogue, winner of this year’s International Booker Prize, is, among many things, a mouthwatering account of a culinary journey through late 1930s Taiwan. The judges praised the book’s ‘sumptuous food writing, laugh-out-loud dialogue and metafictional twists’, describing it as ‘both a delicious romance and an incisive postcolonial novel’.

Whether it’s rice noodles in a pork-bone broth, a roast turkey dinner, otter with lobster sauce, or kipper fillets with lemon juice, these 11 Booker-nominated novels describe a range of delicious, unusual and, on occasion, disastrous meals. We’ve even suggested recipes to complement each book, inspired by the dishes they describe – although some we recommend you try at your own risk.

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated by Lin King

Food is at the heart of Taiwan Travelogue – acquiring and preparing it, as well as eating it – and the two women at the book’s centre grow close over numerous, sensuous, shared meals. The young Japanese novelist Aoyoma-san is famous for her ‘monstrous appetite’ and her Taiwanese interpreter Chi-chan is adept at keeping her satiated. 

Food writer Fuchsia Dunlop described the book as, ‘A witty, rapturous hymn to Taiwanese food and a stinging critique of Japanese colonialism. The gluttonous narrator Aoyama’s longed-for love story becomes a meditation on power, inequality and identity.’ Asked how she went about writing the book, author Yáng Shuāng-zǐ told the Booker Prizes, ‘Research for the novel’s central themes of travel and food changed my life in two obvious ways: my savings went down; my weight went up.’ 

Eva Cheuk-Yin Li, writing in The Conversation, said, ‘At first glance, the novel almost resembles a cookbook. Each chapter is named after a meal shared by the two women. Taiwan Travelogue’s prose lingers over the preparation of meals, unfamiliar ingredients and the rituals of eating together. Food is not simply decorative detail, but a way of unfolding history and negotiating power.’

Goes well with winter melon soup, braised pork rice

Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel

Winning the Booker Prize in 2009, Mantel’s fictionalised biography of the infamous Thomas Cromwell is considered by many to be one of the greatest historical novels of the 21st century. 

Depicting the rise of King Henry VIII’s chief minister, Wolf Hall gives us a Cromwell who is charming and conniving. He’s determined to push his own political agenda as he helps the king divorce Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn. 

Mantel’s novel is set in Tudor England in the 1520s, and she uses food to represent social class, featuring luxurious meals of porpoise and venison for the court, while servants dine on bread and plain fish. Shared meals and hosted dinners often serve as a tactic aimed at influencing attendees to adhere to the host’s political preferences. 

Writing in The Telegraph, food writer Bee Wilson said, ‘the food is so vivid it practically becomes an extra character. Courtiers spoon up junkets, and quinces stewed with honey. They eat syllabubs; poached chicken breast in a tarragon sauce; ‘fat brambles with yellow cream’; and roasted Warden pears. Mantel imagines Anne Boleyn when she is the king’s mistress, mischievously purloining a ‘fine aged cheese’ given as a gift by the Spanish ambassador to the queen, Catherine of Aragon. First Anne steals the cheese; next the husband.’

Goes well with: lemon syllabub, roasted pear

Cooking with Fernet Branca by James Hamilton-Paterson

A satire set in the hills of Tuscany, Cooking with Fernet Branca tells the story of snobbish Gerald Samper, a ghostwriter of celebrity memoirs, whose true goal is to become a gourmet chef. He invents an array of bizarre concoctions with questionable ingredients, from mussels cooked in chocolate and soy sauce to the book’s namesake, the bitter Italian liqueur Fernet Branca combined with garlic-flavoured ice cream. 

Gerald forces his culinary creations onto his eccentric neighbour, film composer Marta, who has her own unusual tastes. The two characters describe their experiences in alternating sections as they contend with outlandish events and strange interlopers, ranging from gangsters to boy-band frontmen.

The book was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2004. Christopher Hirst, writing in the Independent, said that ‘Hamilton-Paterson pulls off some fine comic set-pieces… But it is the recipes that linger in the mind. The “single drop of household paraffin” added to Alien Pie is a truly ghastly touch.’

Goes well with: cantina band, mussels with Guinness

Reef by Romesh Gunesekera

Full of tantalising descriptions of food, Reef is set in a disappearing paradise in 1970s Sri Lanka. Triton’s passion for food is cultivated after he becomes a chef for his employer, Mister Salgado, a marine biologist who lives an isolated life. Triton uses his cooking skills to advance his career and seek independence. 

Gunesekera describes the meals Triton creates in lavish detail, explaining his elaborate process of roasting a turkey at Christmas along with his many other inventive creations, all infused with a variety of flavours. 

In an interview with the Guardian, Gunesekera said that ‘Food is everything to Triton - his art, his vocation, his identity.’ Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 1994, Reef also highlights the political unrest that engulfs Sri Lanka, along with the destruction of its reefs, setting the scene of a country in turmoil. 

According to Publishers Weekly, ‘Gunesekera brings a moving combination of innocence and wisdom to Triton’s first-person narration. His spare, lyrical prose evokes the sensuous heat of the tropical island and conveys mouthwatering descriptions of Triton’s many culinary triumphs.’

Goes well with: roast turkey, crab cakes

The Sea, The Sea by Iris Murdoch

Retired theatre director Charles Arrowby is fed up with London life and seeks refuge in an isolated house called Shruff End on the British coast. He is intending to write his memoir, but his solitude is disrupted when his old childhood sweetheart, Mary Hartley Fitch, makes an unexpected appearance. Determined to win her back, Arrowby becomes obsessive and controlling as tragic events transpire, making him question everything.

Arrowby often tells us about his quirky meals for the day, things like anchovy paste on hot buttered toast, bananas and cream with white sugar, and Welsh rarebit with hot beetroot. He wonders if he should create a four-minute cookbook and believes that one of the secrets of a happy life is continuous small treats. 

According to Valerie Stivers in The Paris Review, the meals described in The Sea, The Sea were what Murdoch and her husband, John Bayley, actually ate. Murdoch’s biographer Peter J. Conradi explained that the couple had ‘aristocratic disdain for food, but they were avid hosts and enjoyers of life.’

The novel won the Booker Prize in 1978. Sophia Martelli in the Guardian said, ‘Murdoch’s subtly, blackly humorous digs at human vanity and self-delusion periodically build into waves of hilarity, and Arrowby is a brilliant creation: a deeply textured, intriguing yet unreliable narrator, and one of the finest character studies of the 20th century.’

Goes well with: summer rarebit

Utz by Bruce Chatwin

Only 154 pages long, Utz was described by Robert McCrum in the Observer as an ‘odd little book’ that is ‘part quest, part travelogue and part character study of a passionate connoisseur.’ 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1988, Utz depicts the life of an unconventional hero, Kaspar Utz, a devoted collector of more than 1,000 pieces of Meissen porcelain. Living in Czechoslovakia during the Cold War, Utz is allowed to leave the country each year, and while he does consider defection, he can’t bear to leave his precious porcelain behind. Set in a time of totalitarianism, Utz becomes a prisoner of not only the regime but also of his own treasured possessions.

A lover of food, Utz claims in the novel that ‘he always cared for his stomach’. When faced with the terror of war, his memory takes him to a more calming place – that of a ‘restaurant at a white road in Provence’ where he was served a plate of haricots verts. ‘He comforted himself with the thought that, when sanity returned and the frontiers were open, he would eat once again in France.’

Goes well with: spiced haricot beans

The Eighth Life by Nino Haratischvili, translated by Charlotte Collins and Ruth Martin

Centred around a secret elixir for making hot chocolate, The Eighth Life spans a turbulent and violent century in the then Soviet Union. Set in Georgia, this 900-page family saga details the lives of several generations of the Jashi family, with each chapter dedicated to a particular family member. In a review for the Financial Times, Boyd Tonkin described the novel as ‘a lavish banquet of family stories that can, for all their sorrows, be devoured with gluttonous delight.’ 

Originally written in German and longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2020, the story begins with a chocolatier, the great-great-grandfather of the narrator, Niza. He creates an addictive recipe that’s described as causing a ‘stupefying… sense of bliss,’ yet is also said to curse anyone who drinks it. Never shared outside the family and never written down, the secret recipe is passed down through the generations with tragic results. As Niza tells the family’s history to her 12-year-old niece Brilka, she hopes the young girl will break the concoction’s curse. 

Goes well with: hot chocolate

Boulder by Eva Baltasar, translated by Julia Sanches

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2023, Boulder tells the story of the eponymous protagonist, who works as a cook on a merchant ship. After finding love with Samsa, an Icelandic geologist, Boulder moves with her to Reykjavík, establishing a whole new life. She opens a successful food truck and serves empanadas, cooking food that brings her joy. But as inertia and mismatched goals of motherhood start to taint her and Samsa’s relationship, Boulder questions the viability of their relationship long-term. 

‘A book about appetite – in the most common sense of the word, since the narrator is a passionate cook – but also about the appetite for another’s body, for life and for freedom. The passages where the narrator cooks on the boat while thinking about the woman she loves are madly sensual descriptions,’ the International Booker Prize 2023 judges said.

Goes well with: beef empanadas

Last Letters from Hav by Jan Morris

Last Letters from Hav is a travelogue about a fictional city imagined by Jan Morris, who creates a world that’s often mistaken for being real. In fact, the novel confused travel agents when it was first published, after they received requests from travellers wanting to visit the made-up city.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1985, the novel is narrated by the author herself, as Morris pens a series of letters about the mysterious place. Her six-month visit sees her observing the unusual culture and history of Hav, creating a detailed description of its identity. 

While devoid of plot, the book serves as a study into a Mediterranean city-state that’s rumoured to be the site of Troy, while also entertaining visits from the likes of Tolstoy and Princess Diana. Providing rich details of the utopia, Morris describes examples of local delicacies, including snow raspberries, considered to be an expensive luxury, and a traditional goat stew that’s served to Morris by the indigenous Kretevs.

Celebrated science fiction author, Ursula K. Le Guin wrote an introduction to an updated version of the book, saying that it read as a ‘brilliant description of the crossroads of the west and east in two recent eras, viewed by a woman who has truly seen the world, and who lives in it with twice the intensity of most of us.’

Goes well with: Caribbean goat curry, raspberry sorbet

Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Sixteen-year-old Marina lives in a small flat in west London with her fragile mother Laura and three Hungarian relatives. She feels stifled by her family’s expectations and desperately wants to escape. Marina persuades them to send her away to boarding school, but, once there, she finds that she’s miserable and homesick. Meanwhile Laura feels the ache of her daughter’s absence and spends her time in an unsavoury affair.

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013, the novel is filled with traditional Hungarian fare, from cold sour-cherry soup and palacsinta stuffed with ground walnuts and rum, to curled ox tongue and cold krumplisaláta.

Bella Bathurst in the Guardian called it beautifully written, warm and funny: ‘It manages to seize an entire slice of Europe for itself, a vast empire full of new and interesting questions about how close, and how far apart, all these postwar worlds have made us. Above all, it is written with love. And good food.’

Goes well with: cold cherry soup, palacsinta

Perfection by Vincenzo Latronico, translated by Sophie Hughes

Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2025, Perfection follows the lives of millennial expat couple Anna and Tom. Living in Berlin as digital nomads, they find themselves falling prey to the comparison that social media brings, all while trying to live a life that feels truly satisfying. 

‘This book really infects you, but without any of the usual techniques of a novel. It eschews traditional storytelling techniques in place of an almost clinical or sociological deep-dive into the trappings of contemporary life,’ said the judges of the International Booker Prize 2025.

Translated from Italian and containing no dialogue, the book features vibrant descriptions of the couple’s aesthetically pleasing life, including their highly curated kitchen filled with trendy appliances and an endless supply of different herbs on their windowsill. The two are at the forefront of online trends in cooking techniques and ingredients, along with many of their contemporaries.

In a review for The Times, Johanna Thomas-Corr called it ‘a devastating critique of aspirational consumerism and personal branding, of a generation’s “identical struggle for a different life”, in a world where the principal means of expressing their agency is through food and fonts.’ 

Goes well with: roasted cauliflower