Breadsong: How Baking Changed Our Lives

"Oh! I cried several times. This is the story of a father and daughter setting up a bakery in the village of Watlington in Oxfordshire. What gives it its narrative drive is that their baking was born out of Kitty suffering from depression at the devastatingly young age of 14. Purely by accident, her father alighted on baking as something that seemed to draw her out of it. He really captures that. They alternate. So he writes and then she writes, and then he writes, and she writes—so you get her perspective, his perspective, her perspective, his perspective. You really get a sense of their relationship. Both have such a distinctive voice. Kitty writes beautifully, but she’s still only 16. It’s a child’s voice, but heartbreakingly so. It’s as if an incredibly accomplished author is writing a child’s voice, but instead it is actually a child’s voice, but very articulate. Her dad is a beautiful writer as well. There is so much love and tenderness in what he writes for her. He was an amateur baker, and it just happened to be something that gradually drew her out of her depression, so they baked more together. Then she really fell for it, and her mum would take her all around the country to different bakeries to speak to bakers. She learned from them, read everything, watched YouTube. She just inhaled baking, basically. She inhaled the aroma of bread and baked more and more for her local community. Then they had pop ups and then, finally, they got their own little bakery called the Orange Bakery . So the first half of the book is that narrative and then the second half of the book is her recipes. It’s absolutely beautiful. It’s such an idyllic portrait of a little British village. Americans would go wild for it. It’s exactly what they imagine Britain to be—until they come…"