JEAN-MARIE D’AUMOUT will try anything once, with consequences that are at times mouthwatering and at others fascinatingly macabre. Orphaned as a child, taken under the wing of a local nobleman and sent to an elite school for young gentlemen, Jean-Marie becomes an Enlightenment-era Zelig. He befriends Ben Franklin, corresponds with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, thwarts a peasant uprising, plays a key role in the Corsican War of Independence, and, among other feats, constructs the finest menagerie in all of Europe. Rising through the ranks of eighteenth-century French society, he feasts with lords, ladies, revolutionaries, and eventually kings. He is a father, a husband, a devoted friend, and an imaginative lover. But Jean-Marie’s every adventurous turn is decided by his obsessive quest to know all of the world’s flavors before that world changes forever. Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, and the delectable decadence of Versailles, The Last Banquet is as gripping as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume and as voluptuous as John Lanchester’s The Debt to Pleasure. Jonathan Grimwood has given readers a sumptuous and hugely appealing novel about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason, about revolution, hunger, and obsession.

Jonathan Grimwood
Jonathan Grimwood has written for The Guardian, The Times, The Telegraph and The Independent and numerous other magazines and newspapers. The Last Banquet is his first work of literary fiction. He divides his time between London and Winchester.

• Apr 4 2014
  NewPages Book Reviews: "Grimwood’s prose is elegant, verging on the Dickensian, and his storytelling ability is compelling."
  
• Dec 16 2013
  The New Yorker: "The story of his life is far richer than its gastronomic eccentricities: he is a fully realized protagonist, at once sober, self-reliant, and inventive."
  
• Dec 16 2013
  The New Yorker: "the story of his life is far richer than its gastronomic eccentricities: he is a fully realized protagonist, at once sober, self-reliant, and inventive."
  
• Dec 9 2013
  NPR: Selects the Last Banquet as One of the Best Books of 2013
  
• Dec 9 2013
  NPR: Selects The Last Banquet as one of the Best Books of 2013
  
• Nov 19 2013
  Mary Whipple Reviews: " The author’s creativity and his immense gifts for description are astonishing on all levels, and the novel itself, while sometimes bizarre, gives new life and a new kind of reality to some tired genres."