C Pam Zhang, 34, was born in Beijing and lives in Brooklyn, New York. She was longlisted for the 2020 Booker prize with her debut, How Much of These Hills Is Gold, an otherworldly western centred on Chinese-American siblings in an alternative 19th century. Her second novel, Land of Milk and Honey, now out in paperback, follows a private chef who gets a job in a billionaire’s Alpine hideaway during a global famine caused by smog. The author Sarah Moss has praised it as “a rich novel of ideas, insisting on moral complexity in the end times”.
What led you to write this book?
Part of me felt itchy having been put in the mould of a writer of historical fiction. Land of Milk and Honey has been labelled dystopian, but when I was writing it in lockdown in 2021, reality felt so dystopian that I’d joke that it felt like our world plus five years. Where I was living at the time was a sort of enclave of tech billionaires in Washington state. I’d be walking around in my isolated life staring at these hedged-off estates, wondering what it was like inside their compounds with their private chefs and pools and basketball courts. I think the novel explores how we define and pursue pleasure in a world crumbling around us. To write about food was fun on a sheer visceral level, which I’d been missing a bit writing my first novel; those characters were simply not allowed to experience much pleasure.
