New Book Roundups

Moveable Feasts
Kathleen Flinn guides us with humor through the culinary terra incognita of Paris's famous Cordon Bleu cooking school in her memoir The Sharper Your Knife, The Less You Cry. Michael Krondl follows the spice trail during his explorations of Venice, Lisbon, and Amsterdam in The Taste of Conquest: The Rise and Fall of the Three Great Spice Cities. Australian chef Greg Malouf enjoys a glass of crisp white wine in the Bekaa Valley and other surprising as well as traditional food-centered experiences in Lebanon and Syria in the handsome coffee table/cookbook Saha: A Chef's Journey Through Lebanon and Syria.

African Roots
In Christopher Hope's extraordinary novel My Mother's Lovers, narrator Alex Healey tries to get out of South Africa—but he can't get South Africa out of himself, anymore than he can refuse the last request of his mother, a large-living aviatrix and huntress who roamed the continent from Cape Town to Cairo. Also set in South Africa, Anne Landsman's novel The Rowing Lesson has Betsy Klein journeying back to the continent to visit her dying father, a Jewish doctor beloved by both his black and white patients.