Set against the backdrop of the Enlightenment, the delectable decadence of Versailles, and the French Revolution, The Last Banquet is the epic tale of one man’s quest to know the world through its many and marvelous flavors. Jean-Marie d’Aumout will try anything once, with consequences that are at times mouthwatering and at others fascinatingly macabre (Three Snake Bouillabaisse anyone? Or perhaps some pickled Wolf's Heart?). When he is not obsessively searching for a new taste d’Aumout is a fast friend, a loving husband, a doting father, and an imaginative lover. He befriends Ben Franklin, corresponds with the Marquis de Sade and Voltaire, becomes a favorite at Versailles, thwarts a peasant uprising, improves upon traditional French methods of contraception, plays an instrumental role in the Corsican War of Independence, and constructs France’s finest menagerie. But d’Aumout’s every adventurous turn is decided by his at times dark obsession to know all the world’s flavors before that world changes irreversibly. As gripping as Patrick Suskind’s Perfume, as gloriously ambitious as Daniel Kehlman’s Measuring the World, and as prize-worthy as Andrew Miller’s Pure, The Last Banquet is a hugely appealing novel about food and flavor, about the Age of Reason and the ages of man, and our obsessions and about how, if we manage to survive them, they can bequeath us wisdom and consolation in old age.

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."