Lilla's Feast: One Woman's True Story of Love and War in the Orient - Softcover

"I loved LILLA'S FEAST - absolutely absorbing, both for its historical content and its personal details. I felt for Lilla, every step of the way ... a real feeling for place fills this book ... lovely." -Margaret Forster, author of Lady's Maid, Daphne Du Maurier, and Georgie Girl

"LILLA'S FEAST is a wonderful, inspiring book. Part page-turner, part history of the British Empire in the Far East, Frances Osborne perfectly captures the stories of a lost generation of women. It is impossible to read this book without admiring the brave adventurers who risked everything, were tested almost beyond endurance, and yet remained proud and strong to the end." -Amanda Foreman, author of GEORGIANA

"Passionately written and compelling, Frances Osborne's impressive debut is a wonderful read. The extraordinary life of this ordinary woman is a tumultuous feast of the senses." -Santa Monefiore

"LILLA'S FEAST is a captivating narrative of one resilient woman's one-hundred-year journey through the cultural changes and political turmoil of the late nineteenth and most of the twentieth centuries. Her collection of exotic recipes were her souvenirs from the many outposts of the British Empire that she called home and became her connection to reality when her freedom was taken away."
-JOANNE LAMB HAYES, author of Grandma's Wartime Kitchen
and Grandma's Wartime Baking Book

A portrait of a remarkable Englishwoman and her extraordinary life follows the author's great-grandmother Lilla from her birth in 1882, through a life of privilege, exotic locales, bad marriages, two world wars, tragedy, deprivation, love, and, above all, food, interweaving selections from Lilla's cookbook, created when she was in an internment camp in China. Reprint. 15,000 first printing.