JESSICA SOFFER

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.

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.

Lyrical graceful Jessica Soffer has captured the glittering magic of New York City Jenny Jackson NYT bestselling author of Pineapple StreetAbe and Jane have been together for fifty years as two among the thousands of starry eyed young lovers in Central Park as frustrated and exhausted parents as an artist and a writer whose careers were taking flight Now Jane is seriously unwell and together she and Abe look back on their marriage on the parts they cherished and those they didn t Abe s early betrayal and the trials of raising their son Max who now grown still believes his mother chose art over parenthood A homage to New York to pleasure loss and love that endures despite or perhaps because of what life throws at us This Is a Love Story brings these layered voices together in a chorus as complex radiant and captivating as the city itself