Let 'em Eat Cake

It is for real: Let 'em Eat Cake is a brilliant first novel from a singular sensibility. Remarkable for its unflinching exactitude, it takes us as never before into the life of lower-middle-class New York City. Anna, a woman of our times, is a metaphor for the boroughs - the Bronx, Queens, Brooklyn, Manhattan, Staten Island - where she has lived. An unwanted child, abused by her father, and now, as the mother of two children abandoned by her husband, she must make ends meet - and with dignity. On a lark Anna becomes a delivery truck driver for HomeMade Cakes, stocking the shelves of grocery stores and bodegas in the city with uncanny pastries. She is our guide, our very own Virgil, as each day she wends her way through the not entirely Dantesque inferno of New York. In the face of the urban vicissitudes that we have all come to know, she is always precise, hilarious, and poignant about the city's sublime insanities.