True Confections: A Novel (PB)

Description

Take chocolate candy, add a family business at war with itself, and stir with an outsiders perspective. This is the recipe for True Confections, the irresistible new novel by Katharine Weber, a writer whose work has won accolades from Iris Murdoch, Madeleine LEngle, Wally Lamb, and Kate Atkinson, to name a few. Alice Tatnall Ziplinskys marriage into the Ziplinsky family has not been unanimously celebrated. Her greatest ambition is to belong, to feel truly entitled to the heritage she has tried so hard to earn. Which is why Zips Candies is much more to her than just a candy factory, where she has worked for most of her life. In True Confections, Alice has her reasons for telling the multigenerational saga of the family-owned-and-operated candy company, now in crisis. Nobody is more devoted than Alice to delving into the truth of Zips history, starting with the rags-to-riches story of how Hungarian immigrant Eli Czaplinsky developed his famous candy lines, and how each of his candies, from Little Sammies to Mumbo Jumbos, was inspired by an element in a stolen library copy of Little Black Sambo, from which he taught himself English. Within Alices vivid and persuasive account (is her unreliability a tactic or a condition?) are the stories of a runaway slave from the cacao plantations of Cte dIvoire and the Third Reichs failed plan to establish a colony on Madagascar for European Jews. Richly informed, deeply moving, and spiked with Webers trademark wit, True Confections is, at its heart, a timeless and universal story of love, betrayal, and chocolate.