Jess Stanley's Something to Eat and Something to Read
Jess is an Australian author living in London; here's what she's eating and reading...
Jess Stanley is an Australian writer living in London. Her first novel, A Great Hope is a family saga set in Melbourne with a mystery at its heart. It has been compared to Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies and Christos Tsiolkas’ The Slap and is currently sitting on my (Sophie here!) bedside table.
Am itching to begin reading it (just need to finish Small Fires first before our next episode recording next week!) but in the meantime, here’s what Annabel Crabb had to say…how good does it sound!!! Let’s all go off and read, then meet back here to discuss.
'Just pages into this book, I felt the electric jolt that accompanies the discovery of a serious new talent. A Great Hope is a genuine literary page-turner that satisfies until the last paragraph' — Annabel Crabb
And on the Chat10 Looks 3 podcast Annabel called it 'A spectacularly well-written, thrilling book that’s a cut above your standard page turner'!
Jess is on Instagram at @dailydoseofjess.
Jess’s newsletter Read.Look.Think is also one of my absolute favourites and always choc-a-block with goodness. Highly recommend subscribing if you like discovering cool new things to read, look at and think about!
Thank you, Jess for sharing what you’re reading and eating with us! We can’t wait to read your book. Congratulations on its enormous success.
Sophie and Germaine x
Ps: see you back here soon for the next episode! And please note you can always catch up on our archive of eps right here.
What was the last book that you read and LOVED! And why?
Helen Garner's blue diaries 'How to End a Story' covers the time in her life when her third marriage to a novelist she calls 'V', is collapsing. She seems incapable of taking on board what he's doing: betraying her, isolating her from family and friends, and ruining her writing life. Meanwhile, she's open about being petty, illogical and self-defeating. It reads like a thriller or a horror story but with jokes, beautiful scenes and observations, and a final entry that makes me cry. I have to believe it's not the last volume of her diaries that she'll publish -- I need more.
What was the last meal you had in a restaurant and LOVED? And why?
Recently I had onglet with peppercorn sauce and chips at Café Cecilia in Hackney with a glass of house red. It was like having an iron transfusion for lunch -- afterwards, I felt so robust and fortified.
What was the last meal you had at home and LOVED? And why?
Last weekend I had loads of mushrooms I got on special, so I was carefully making a risotto -- suddenly, I realised I left out the garlic. I whizzed up old sourdough, parmesan, parsley and garlic in the food processor to make a green garlic crumb. I finished it off in the oven, so the crumbs were lovely and toasted. I can't believe how nice it was, and all from a mistake.
What’s your go-to comfort read?
I read and reread Alan Hollinghurst's 'The Line of Beauty' constantly. I have my paperback (signed by AH!), I have it on Kindle on my phone, and I listen to the audiobook when I can't sleep. It has been a constant presence in my life for more than a decade. It's the funniest, cleverest, most beautiful and moving book I've ever read more than 200 times. It's about a young gay aesthete who lodges in a giant house in 1980s Notting Hill with the rich family of a Conservative MP.
What’s your go-to comfort food?
During the first lockdown here in London, I made a Victoria sponge every few days. It wasn't exactly healthy, but it was very, very comforting to know we had something nice to have with a cup of tea. I use Felicity Cloake's recipe where you weigh the eggs and everything follows from that.
A cookbook you are loving cooking out of at the moment?
I do own and read a lot of cookbooks for inspiration, though I don't strictly cook recipes from them. Recently I've been returning to Carter Were's Cookbook 1, but I also love, love, love her Instagram, and have made Greek Lentil Soup about four times since she posted this simple guide on IG:
You get to invite 4 of your favourite writers over for dinner; who are they, and what will you cook for them?
I'd love to have Jonathan Franzen round, I watched all his streamed press tours for Crossroads, and when asked a question, he seems to have a pathological inability to lie or deflect. I feel like you could ask him anything and he would go deep (my favourite dinner party thing).
I'd love to have Virginia Woolf but I think she'd might be difficult and a bit of a snob, flicking Leonard little looks like 'get me out of here.'
Also: Helen Garner, Alan Hollinghurst. I wish I could have PD James too. Maybe I'd invite my friend and neighbour Lisa Owens, who wrote the brilliant comic novel Not Working. Then I'd have someone to dissect it with afterward.
I'd serve Ottolneghi's Confit Tandoori Chickpeas, because you can prepare it all before so zero stress.