Two women adrift in New York - an Iraqi immigrant widow and the latchkey daughter of a famous chef - find each other and a new kind of family through their shared love of cooking. Lorca, a sensitive and troubled thirteen-year-old, spends hours poring over cookbooks, seeking out ingredients for her distracted chef of a mother, who is about to send her off to boarding school. In one last effort to secure her mother's love and prove herself indispensable, Lorca resolves to replicate her mother's ideal meal. Victoria, an octogenarian Iraqi immigrant, teaches cooking lessons. Grappling with grief over her husband's death, Victoria has been dreaming of the daughter they gave up forty years ago. Together these two women - a widow and an almost-orphan - begin to suspect they are connected through more than a love of food.

"A profound and necessary new voice. Soffer's prose is as controlled as it is fresh, as incisive as it is musical. Soffer has arrived early, with an orchestra of talent at her disposal." -- Colum McCann