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The Bolter
The Bolter
Frances Osborne
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Lilla's Feast
Lilla's Feast
Frances Osborne
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Park Lane
Park Lane
Frances Osborne
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Lilla's Feast: A Story of Love, War and a Passion for Food
Lilla's Feast: A Story of Love, War and a Passion for Food
Frances Osborne
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Lilla's Feast

3.76 ( 412 Ratings by Goodreads)
Lilla's Feast

Lilla's Feast

(Author)
3.76 (412 Ratings by Goodreads)
hardback
Published: 1 September, 2004
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Description

The tale of Lilla, the author's great-grandmother, begins with her birth in Chefoo in China in 1882, where she lived a charmed and Bohemian expat life, the younger of a set of 'heavenly twins' from a spirited, unvictorian family. Lilla's eventful life was to span five continents and three husbands, forming a panoramic picture of British colonial life in the Orient (during the Boxer Rebellion, Pearl Harbour, and the rise of Communism) and under the British Raj in India. Throughout her life, Lilla's personal obsession was cooking. It was also her way of showing devotion to her cold and remote husband. Food was her wonderland and her means of survival, her way to help make 'a man love you, long for you, and hold back tears when he is forced to leave your side'. It was while Lilla was in a Japanese prison camp that she began to dream up recipes and jot them down like a modern Mrs Beeton. Her brother, a talented illustrator, provided drawings. Empowered by imagination and strength of spirit, her cookbook was composed as if the war had never happened. Lilla's journey ends a hundred years on with her death in Tunbridge Wells - the peaceful conclusion to a sensuous, full life of passion, romance, and courage. Told tenderly and wittily by the author, in this family memoir Lilla becomes a living presence. The text will be liberally sprinkled with recipes, rare maps, letters and photographs from the author's personal archives.
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Type Book
ISBN13 9780385606660
ISBN10 0385606664
Number Of Pages 324
Item Weight 720 g
Product Dimensions 156 x 36 x 236 mm
Publisher / Reseller Doubleday
Format hardback
Edition 1st
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Media Reviews

I loved LILLA'S FEAST - absolutely absorbing, both for its historical content and its personal details. I felt for Lilla, every step of the way ... a real feeling for place fills this book ... lovely. -Margaret Forster, author of Lady's Maid, Daphne Du Maurier, and Georgie Girl LILLA'S FEAST is a wonderful, inspiring book. Part page-turner, part history of the British Empire in the Far East, Frances Osborne perfectly captures the stories of a lost generation of women. It is impossible to read this book without admiring the brave adventurers who risked everything, were tested almost beyond endurance, and yet remained proud and strong to the end. -Amanda Foreman, author of GEORGIANA Passionately written and compelling, Frances Osborne's impressive debut is a wonderful read. The extraordinary life of this ordinary woman is a tumultuous feast of the senses. -Santa Monefiore LILLA'S FEAST is a captivating narrative of one resilient woman's one-hundred-year journey through the cultural changes and political turmoil of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. Her collection of exotic recipes were her souvenirs from the many outposts of the British Empire that she called home and became her connection to reality when her freedom was taken away. -JOANNE LAMB HAYES, author of Grandma's Wartime Kitchen and Grandma's Wartime Baking Book

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Author's Bio

Frances Osborne studied Law at Oxford and trained as a barrister and journalist. She is in her early thirties and has two young children.

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