Corsair scoops Stewart's Test Kitchen

Corsair has acquired “high-stakes” novel Test Kitchen by Glasgow-born Neil D A Stewart, for publication in July 2024.

Deputy publisher Sarah Castleton bought UK and Commonwealth rights from Becky Thomas at Lewinsohn Literary.

The synopsis reads: “Test Kitchen is set on a single evening in 2013 at a prestigious East London restaurant, Midgard. Our narrator is Marley, a young Melbourne-born waitress who’s come to London to escape her past and is glad to have found a kind of family among the kitchen brigade. Like any family, however, it’s dysfunctional, and Marley’s youth and rootlessness put her at risk. A violent event leaves her a spectre observing events – incorporeal in a robustly physical space – and seeking to put things right.”

“Around her unfold the stories of her colleagues in the kitchen – the cook she dated, her sometime friend the patisserie chef, the waitress who disdains her, the one-eyed head chef, even the sinister lavatory attendant – while out on the dining room floor, table by table, we eavesdrop on the stories of diners working their way through Midgard’s tasting menu: the dating couple, the food critic, the secretive businessmen, the mysterious lone diner whose story will intersect violently with Marley’s own. Everyone at Midgard that night has a secret, and everyone has a story – and some of them will come to brutal ends.”

Castleton says: “It has been 10 years since we published Neil’s debut novel and his second one is more than worth the wait. Test Kitchen takes us on a journey through the full range of human hungers – a complex tasting menu of desire, jealousy, love, loathing, ambition, fear, grief and revenge. Neil so brilliantly captures the reality – often surreality – of life in a high-end kitchen during one fateful service, and tantalisingly combines it with the dramas developing at each of the tables front of house. It’s a high-stakes piece of storytelling, rich with culinary intrigue, exquisitely constructed. And it pairs well with a glass of something robust to steady the nerves…”

Stewart says: “Some books, like some elaborate meals, take a lot of preparation before they’re ready to be served up. Test Kitchen has been a decade in the making, and I’m delighted that be working with Corsair, who published The Glasgow Coma Scale so beautifully, and to collaborate again with the wise and astute Sarah Castleton and her brilliant team. I can’t wait for readers to meet Marley and the other staff and diners at Midgard, to get their appetites whetted and their hearts broken.”