But it’s not normal cookery show – Elizabeth’s recipes are for good, hearty and nutritious meals, incorporating all the food groups in the right proportions. Mad, a gifted child, found it hard to make friends and that worked with Amanda.Įlizabeth, who needed a job, is persuaded to be the host of a new teatime cookery show, Supper at Six, which is soon a huge hit.

It transpires that Walter, divorced, was rubbish at making lunch for his daughter, so Mad always let Amanda eat hers in the name of friendship.

Walter Pine is a daytime TV show producer and confronted with a woman who ‘looked down at him like a battlefield medic assessing whether or not he was worth saving,’ was smitten – he’d found his next TV star! When she discovers that Amanda Pine was eating Mad’s carefully balanced lunch every day, she stormed into Amanda’s father’s office to complain. It was the lunch box that was to be the next turning point in Elizabeth’s life. The first paragraph immediately reels in the reader,īack in 1961, when women wore shirtwaist dresses and joined garden clubs and drove legions of children around in seatbelt-less cars without giving it a second thought back before anyone knew there’d even be a sixties movement, much less one that its participants would spend the next sixty years chronicling back when the big wars were over and the secret wars had just begun and people were starting to think fresh and believe everything was possible, the thirty-year-old mother of Madeline Zott rose before dawn every morning and felt certain of just one thing: her life was over. The plot runs from the early 1950s through the 1960s, but we begin in the middle at 1961 as Elizabeth Zott is packing her five-year-old daughter’s lunch box and slipping a note in with it. The title promises chemistry, and having a scientific background, I was bound to read it, and crossed my fingers for some real (but accessible) science, not just sexual chemistry: and yes, we get both! What’s more Garmus has published her debut novel at the age of 64 pouring a lifetime’s experience into her book. This is the case with Lessons in Chemistry.

Sometimes the hype is true, and a publisher’s lead-title for the season really is worth the advance praise heaped on it.

Books by bonnie garmus