One of BBC Culture's Ten Books to Read this March and The Rumpus Book Club Pick for MarchMaylis de Kerangal follows up her acclaimed novel The Heart with a dissection of the world of a young Parisian chefMore like a poetic biographical essay on a fictional person than a novel, The Cook is a coming-of-age journey centered on Mauro, a young self-taught cook. The story is told by an unnamed female narrator, Mauro's friend and disciple who we also suspect might be in love with him. Set not only in Paris but in Berlin, Thailand, Burma, and other far-flung places over the course of fifteen years, the book is hyperrealistic—to the point of feeling, at times, like a documentary. It transcends this simplistic form, however, through the lyricism and intensely vivid evocative nature of Maylis de Kerangal's prose, which conjures moods, sensations, and flavors, as well as the exhausting rigor and sometimes violent abuses of...

Reminiscent of the sweeping scale of classic American adventure films, this Medici Prize–winning novel chronicles the construction of an immense suspension bridge in a fictional city in California. Maylis de Kerangal interweaves the stories of a dozen men and women from the consortium of workers who converge on the site. With their various nationalities and social classes, these engineers, designers, divers, overseers, and protesters present a microcosm of not just California, but of humanity as a whole. Their collective effort to realize the megaproject recounts one of the oldest of human dramas, to domesticate—and to radically transform—our world through built form.Kerangal's writing has been widely praised for its scope, originality, and use of language. The style of her prose is rich and innovative, playing with different registers (from the most highly literary to the most colloquial slang), taking risks and inventing words, and playing with speed...

Just before dawn on a Sunday morning, three teenage boys go surfing. Returning home, exhausted, the driver lets the car drift off the road into a tree. Two of the boys are wearing seat belts; one is sent through the windshield. He is declared brain-dead shortly after arriving at the hospital. His heart is still beating.The Heart takes place over the twenty-four hours surrounding a fatal accident and a resulting heart transplant as life is taken from a young man and given to a woman close to death. In gorgeous, ruminative prose it examines the deepest feelings of everyone involved—grieving parents, hardworking doctors and nurses—as they navigate decisions of life and death. As stylistically audacious as it is emotionally explosive, Maylis de Kerangal's The Heart has mesmerized readers in France, where it has been hailed as the breakthrough work of a new literary star.