Henry's 'proudest book yet' to Octopus

Mitchell Beazley has acquired new cookbook from award-winning food writer Diana Henry, called How To Eat A Peach: Menus, stories and places.

Denise Bates, group publishing director at Octopus Publishing Group, acquired world rights all languages directly from the author.

How To Eat A Peach will be a collection of the recipes Henry cooks up for family and friends based on meals she has cooked and places she has loved over the years, publishing as a £25 hardback in April 2018.

Henry said she felt more proud of this book than any other book she had written. She has authored over 10 books, including A Change of Appetite (Mitchell Beazley) which was voted Cookbook of the Year by the Guild of Food Writers in 2015.

"It’s ostensibly a book of menus – and many of my very favourite dishes are here - but it’s also a book about place, how we connect to different places through food, how they make us the cooks we are, and how we visit places (and periods of our lives) again and again through what we make in our kitchens at home," she said. "There are recipes and menus from cities, regions and countries I’ve lived in, visited often and love, from New York to Bordeaux, Catalonia to Piedmont, Turkey to Mexico."

Bates said: "This new book shows Diana at the height of her powers – not only as a superb cook, who can assemble a flow of dishes with just the right balance, but also as a writer, with her magical evocation of the places and people that have shaped her cooking. ”

Henry has won numerous awards for her journalism and books, including Cookery Journalist of the Year from the Guild of Food Writers (three times, most recently in 2015), Cookery Writer of the Year at the Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards in 2013 and 2015 and Cookery Book of the Year for Simple at Fortnum & Mason Food and Drink Awards 2017.