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A Novel
by S. E. Boyd
Set in the intersecting worlds of fine dining, Hollywood, and the media, a darkly hilarious and ultimately affecting story about the underside of success and fame, and our ongoing complicity in devouring our cultural heroes.
While filming on location in Belfast, Northern Ireland, John Doe, the universally adored host of the culinary travel show Last Call, is found dead in a hotel room in an apparent suicide. As the news of his untimely demise breaks stateside, a group of friends, fixers, hustlers, and opportunists vie to seize control of the narrative: Doe's chess-master of an agent Nia, ready to call in every favor she is owed to preserve his legacy; down-on-her-luck journalist Katie, who fabricates a story about Doe to save her job at a failing website; and world-famous chef Paolo Cabrini, Doe's closest friend and confidant, who finds himself entangled with a deranged Belfast hotel worker whose lurid secret might just take them all down.
Bolstered by the authors' insider knowledge of high-end restaurants and low-end media, The Lemon delivers a raucous examination of our culture with deliciously cutting prose, crackling dialogue, and an unpredictable plot that will keep you riveted to the last page.
"A helluva novel. Hip-deep in knowing detail from the worlds of food, media, and Hollywood... A hilarious, brilliant, cynical (and maybe even a little sad) takedown of the moral vacuum that is celebrity culture." - Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"A bawdy Judd-Apatow-meets-Carl-Hiaasen romp ... The dialogue crackles, the zip line plot slings the reader from one hilariously fraught incident to the next, and the conclusion is as emotionally satisfying as ever an author—or three—could have concocted. Like a perfectly seared slice of foie gras with a dollop of lingonberry jam on an artisanal toast point, The Lemon simply cannot be put down, and when you've finished it, you'll want more." - BookPage (starred review)
"The writers are unafraid to let each character show an unpleasant side, but the narrative loses focus by the final act. Still, there's plenty of barbed commentary along the way." - Publishers Weekly
"This bitingly satiric tale examines the mix of greed and reverence that drives people who have something to gain or to protect. " - Library Journal
"Every story line offers suspense and surprises, and the book's deadpan humor is unremitting.... This frequently brilliant debut novel is a hilarious spoof of monetization mania and foodie culture." - Shelf Awareness
"Fearless, moving, and funny as hell. This is incisive, witty, era-defining literature like they used to make it. Thank God it's back." - Lisa Taddeo, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Three Women and Animal
"S. E. Boyd has taken the secret ingredient to fame—'shameless persistence'—and used it to pressure-cook up a novel funny enough and hot enough to singe the high brows off of any raised-pinkie foodie." - Paul Beatty, Booker Prize–winning author of The Sellout
"Deliciously trenchant, hilarious, and impossible to put down, this dark comedy says something profound about the world of celebrity and the mesmerizing subversives within it." - Cheryl Lu-Lien Tan, author of the international bestsellers Sarong Party Girls and A Tiger in the Kitchen
This information about The Lemon was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
S. E. Boyd is the creation of veteran journalists Kevin Alexander and Joe Keohane, and editor Alessandra Lusardi. All lightly damaged Catholics prone to extensive overanalysis, Alexander, Keohane, and Lusardi have between them authored four books, edited dozens more, and written for Esquire, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker, among others. Alexander also won a James Beard Award for food writing, a fact Keohane and Lusardi are both tired of hearing about. This is their first novel.
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