Mingling sweet, sour, and spicy notes, this inspiring retelling of diverse food legends from India, paired with delicious recipes, will feed mind, body, heart, and soul.

Annapurna, the Indian Goddess of Nourishment, presides over a rich harvest of stories reimagined for the twenty-first-century palate. Here, food manifests as ploy, bargain, symbolic communication, a bone of contention, a lesson, as it weaves through the lives of a cast of characters — kings and commoners, witches and goddesses, gurus and bandits, refugees and travellers.

Each story is followed by a vegetarian recipe offered up by a character. Gathered from the four corners of India, there are well-known dishes like nourishing dal and irresistible mango lassi, novelties like avial and Bengali khichari, as well as a new twist on beloved foods, such as samosas with a peas and coconut filling.

Infused with humane values, expertly blending the timeless and the contemporary, the magical and the everyday, encompassing East, West, and the in-between, this fusion of fiction and food will delight and inspire.

Veena Gokhale started her career in the mercurial world of print journalism in Bombay, in the 1980s. She first came to Canada on a journalism fellowship, returning to do a Masters in Environmental Studies in Toronto. After immigrating, she worked in communications for non-profit organizations, which included a two-year stint in Tanzania. She has published fiction and poetry in anthologies and literary journals, and read from her work. In 2011, she received a grant from Vivacité Montréal, Quebec Arts Council, to write her first novel. She is currently marketing that book. She lives in Montreal with her partner, Marc-Antoine.

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Gokhale fleshes out the archetypes in these stories in a way that feels fresh and compelling, and time and place are beautifully, vividly rendered. I could almost swear that some of these stories have an actual aroma. When I came across the recipe for dal, I was inspired to head to the kitchen and make it.

Anita Anand, author of A Convergence of Solitudes

There is a golden vein of poetry that flavours food lore, and Veena Gokhale has mined it well. Gokhale has served up a new oral tradition: a book fit to be consumed voraciously by mind and by mouth. These ancient tales of feast and famine and fire and flood have been skillfully reworked into a tapestry that weaves myth with menu. It deserves a permanent place at our dinner table.

Gavin Barrett, Toronto poet, author of Understan, founder of Tartan Turban Secret Readings

Annapurna’s Bounty is ingeniously designed as a banquet for the body and the mind: each of its ten chapters offers a tale and a recipe from various eras and regions of India. Men and women, divinities, demons and animals are the heroes of these vivid and colourful stories, over which floats the heady scent of mangoes and spices.

Frédéric Charbonneau, author of L'école de la gourmandise

Lovers of Indian culture and cuisine will delight in the panoply of characters in these tales where food is the riddle, the salve, the forger of bonds, the wisdom, the life-and-death clincher. Aromatic and flavourful reading! Excellent recipes a happy bonus!

Alice Zorn, author of Colours in Her Hands

Veena Gokhale is a talented fiction writer and a food lover. Annapurna’s Bounty is an irresistible blend of these two great passions, combining delightful Indian legends, freshly told, with her personally honed recipes. This is a book you will want to buy twice: one to give a good friend and another to keep.

Marianne Ackerman, Montreal novelist and playwright