Julia Stuart's latest novel is
The Pigeon Pie Mystery.
One of
five of the best stories about domestic servants she tagged for the
Wall Street Journal:
The Book of Salt
by Monique Truong (2003)
This novel is delicately stuffed with linguistic truffles, inviting the reader to stop and savor. A chef prepares squabs by "wrapping each bird in a web of fat and holding it in place with a jab of thyme. The birds looked like babies swaddled in crocheted shawls." Such is the 
power of Monique Truong's prose that I drift off into fantasies about cooking, something I've been repeatedly warned never to attempt again. But Truong offers more than just seductive flourishes of the pen. This traveling banquet moves back and forth from 1930s Paris to Indochina, courtesy of Binh, a gay Vietnamese cook, whose role as a servant is astutely drawn. While Binh is privy to the intimacies of his "Mesdames," fictionalized versions of the art collector and writer Gertrude Stein and her lover, Alice B. Toklas, they, like all his employers before them, don't even bother to learn how to pronounce his name.
Read about
another novel on the list.
--Marshal Zeringue
Julia Stuart's latest novel is The Pigeon Pie Mystery.
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