Mixed Messages Extra: Read an extract from Feast

A girl is born with an extraordinary gift, but her difference might be her curse. Meet Minha in this extract

Hi, welcome to Mixed Messages Extra! This week, we’re giving you an extract from author Catherine Kurtz’s debut novel, Feast.

---

Last week, author Catherine Kurtz shared how her global family led to her feeling like a citizen of the world. She also spoke about living life as an unconventional woman, and why modern society isn’t made for us.

Her debut novel, Feast, is now out in the world, following the story of Minha, a mixed-race girl born with an extraordinary gift in the soot-streaked alleys of 19th-century London.

Desperate to escape a life of poverty, she crosses the sea to France, chasing the shimmer of a better future. But when her talent for taste is discovered at a grand estate, her strange ability becomes her salvation – and her curse. Appointed as a personal poison-taster, she is confined to her tasting room and forced to live in the chateau's shadows. With each dish, she enters a world of glittering porcelain and gilded secrets, where danger simmers beneath every course...

I’m excited to bring you an extract from the first chapter today, which I know many readers will relate to.

Read it below.

Read an extract from Feast

London, 1882

It was bread. Yes, bread that caused her infant self finally to stir. That peculiar alchemy that converts flour and yeast, in a well- seasoned oven, to what can only be called bliss. Minutes old, she could not taste it, not yet. But as the ovens were opened in the bakery below, and that infinitely tempting yeasted fug coiled up through bare floorboards, in through a single ill- fitting early- morning window, her round dark eyes opened for the first time. A mirror pair, her father’s, had been trained on her, full of concern. She was so still. His eyes brightened at this sign of life, restored to their usual carefree sparkle.