Be My Guest: Reflections on Food, Community and the Meaning of Generosity

The dinner table, among friends, is where the best conversations take place - talk about the world, religion, politics, culture and cooking. In the same way, Be My Guest is a conversation about all those things, mediated through the sharing of food. We live in a world where some have too much and others not enough, where immigrants and refugees are both welcomed and vilified, and where most of us spend less and less time cooking and eating together. Priya Basil invites us to explore the meaning and limits of hospitality today, and in doing so makes a passionate plea for a kinder, more welcoming realisation that we have more in common than divides us.

About the Author :
Priya Basil was born in London to a family with Indian roots and grew up in Kenya. She is an author and essay-writer whose work has been nominated for the Commonwealth Writers' Prize, the Dylan Thomas Prize and the International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award. She is the co-founder of Authors for Peace, a political platform for writers and artists. She lives in Berlin. priyabasil.com

Review :
An intimate, delicious and thought-provoking story, told with warmth, humour and generosity A powerful meditation on hospitality . . . Packed with such brilliance [Basil's] notion of "unconditional hospitality" could save the world . . . Her views are radical and persuasive, rooted in the knotty, sensual, frequently funny complexity of her peripatetic life . . . compellingly beautiful The subject of food and its many-threaded associations - of generosity and privation, sharing and hoarding, diversity and denial, pleasure and fear - is the starting point for this absorbing meditation on the interface of self with other in contemporary Europe. Priya Basil writes with honesty, clarity and wit about what it means to be hospitable in a culture of selfishness, and the problems and possibilities of commonality A brave and beautiful exploration into food, race, memory and the very meaning of life. I read it greedily - and so will you Be My Guest is a great essay on food and hospitality, on the act of sharing meals together, of family and of migration. It uses food and feeding guests and ideas of hospitality to ask bigger, wider questions about the precariousness of immigration and the inhospitable times we find ourselves in. Beautifully, deliciously written A nourishing celebration of global culture and creeds [and] a thoughtful reflection . . . Written with poetry and heart, Basil manages to unite huge themes that affect us all while capturing the beauty of sharing Reading this rich exploration of what it means to cook for others is like pulling up a chair at the ideal dinner party. The food is mouth-watering . . . but just as nourishing is the conversation, which embraces hospitality in its many guises . . . irresistible Really rather wonderful . . . [A] warm gem of a book A candid, often very funny, insightful look at food and the complexity of hospitality - a brilliant book