idway
through life, is alone. Her husband passed away long ago, and her cosmopolitan
daughter is already out the door, keen to marry and move to the city. At loose
ends, Rosa decides to transplant herself to the flat, foggy Lombardy provinces
from her native Naples and there finds a way to renew herself--by opening a
restaurant, and in the process coming to a new appreciation of the myriad
relationships possible between women, from friendship to caregiving to
collaboration to emotional and physical love.

Unconventional in style and yet rivetingly
accessible, The Hunger of Women is a novel infused with the pleasures of
the body and the little shocks of daily life. Made up of Rosa's observations,
reflections, and recipes, it tracks her mental journey back to reconnect with
her own embattled mother's age-old wisdom, forward to her daughter's
inconceivable future, and laterally to the world of Rosa's new community of
lovers and customers. A tribute not only to the tradition of women's writing on
hearth and home but to the legacy of such boundary-breaking feminist writers as
Gertrude Stein, Virginia Woolf, and Hélène Cixous, The Hunger of Women is
nothing less than a literary feast.