The Arctic Curry Club by Dani Redd

 

The Arctic Curry Club by Dani Redd.

Published 9th December 2021 by Avon.

From the cover of the book:

‘For my whole life I had been looking for home. But why would that be in a place that I’d left? Perhaps I had to keep moving forward in order to find it…’

Soon after upending her life to accompany her boyfriend Ryan to the Arctic, Maya realises it’s not all Northern Lights and husky sleigh rides. Instead, she’s facing sub-zero temperatures, 24-hour darkness, crippling anxiety – and a distant boyfriend as a result.

In her loneliest moment, Maya opens her late mother’s recipe book and cooks Indian food for the first time. Through this, her confidence unexpectedly grows – she makes friends, secures a job as a chef, and life in the Arctic no longer freezes her with fear.

But there’s a cost: the aromatic cuisine rekindles memories of her enigmatic mother and her childhood in Bangalore. Can Maya face the past and forge a future for herself in this new town? After all, there’s now high demand for a Curry Club in the Arctic, and just one person with the know-how to run it…

A tender and uplifting story about family, community, and finding where you truly belong – guaranteed to warm your heart despite the icy setting!

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Anglo-Indian chef Maya is someone who is not really sure where she belongs, even if she can't remember much about her life in India before the death of her mother when she was seven. Perhaps if she could overcome her fears, stepping out of her comfort zone might be just the thing she needs?

Then an exciting opportunity comes her way... Her boyfriend Ryan persuades her to accompany him for the duration of his placement studying polar bears in the Arctic, and the prospect of sleigh rides and romantic snuggles watching the Northern Lights has her excited, but the reality of living in Longyearbyen, the most northerly town in the world, is rather different. The sub-zero temperatures, constant darkness and threat of polar bear attacks are far from romantic or cosy, and pretty soon Maya's crippling anxiety lays her low and brings a distance between her and Ryan. Maybe coming here was a mistake, especially since she was already feeling unsettled by her father's decision to move to India and his impending marriage?

When Maya takes the opportunity of a job offer to become a chef at an Arctic pursuits training camp just outside town, she starts to make good friends of her own and learns how to cope with life in this extreme environment, but it is unexpectedly, the return of Maya's English father to the country of her birth that gives her the strength to follow her dreams. For it is Maya's ambition to run an Arctic Curry Club in frozen Svalbard, based on a fusion of the handwritten recipes of her mother, which come into her possession when she attends her father's wedding in Bangalore, and the Nordic flavours of her icy adopted home. Maya slowly, and sometimes painfully, reconnects with her childhood, as the aromatic and sensual flavours of Indian cuisine bring back long forgotten memories of her mother, and as she finds a way to piece together her own identity she also comes to finally understand that standing on her own two feet is how to discover where she belongs.

When I began Maya's story, I was expecting a cosy rom-com set in a chilly environment, full of the kind of experiences that Maya herself thought would be part of her Arctic adventure, but in fact Dani Redd has cleverly created a tale in these pages that is about so much more than a girl-meets-boy scenario. Instead, this is a story about how some very challenging times help Maya to take control of her life.

This is a story full of family, true friendship and pulling together in adversity, with Maya's many experiences about life in Longyearbyen contrasting beautifully with those from her visit to baking-hot Bangalore, and everything goes together into one big mixing pot to produce a bit of story magic. The cooking theme works so well throughout, tying Maya's memories closely with the evocative aromas and flavours of her childhood, highlighting how our experience of food is about so much more than the ingredients. This proves to be something of a metaphor for both Maya's culinary ambitions and personal journey, as she finds just the right recipe to put together all the little pieces of her mixed heritage. 

There are laughs, chiefly from the absurdity of the situations that arise, but Redd does not shy away from also exploring some pretty dark themes about mental health, family trauma, and acceptance through the stories of many of the characters here, which elicit many tears of both the happy and sad variety. 

This is such a wonderful heart and stomach warming story of self-discovery, that takes you through the whole gamut of emotional flavours - and I guarantee you will be craving a curry by the time you reach the gorgeous ending.

The Arctic Curry Club is available to buy now in paperback, ebook and audio formats from your favourite book retailer.

Thank you to Avon for sending me a proof of this book in return for an honest review.

About the author:

Dani Redd is the debut author of The Arctic Curry Club, which was longlisted for the Lucy Cavendish Prize. She has an MA and PhD in Creative Writing from the University of East Anglia. This involved research trips to some of Europe’s remoter islands, including Spitsbergen, in the Arctic Circle. After this, she spent two years living in India. She now lives in Norwich with her husband, and is working as a food editor while writing that tricky second novel.