It’s getting harder to see a difference between dystopian and realist fiction. Land of Milk and Honey, Zhang’s second novel after the deservedly Booker-longlisted How Much of These Hills Is Gold, is set in a near future or alternative present in which smog has covered almost the whole planet, ending agriculture and causing global famine and mass extinction. The unnamed 29-year-old narrator is part of “Generation Mayfly”, her life expectancy shortened by pollution, malnutrition and social breakdown. The daughter of a Chinese woman who emigrated to the US, she drops out of medical school to become a chef and is stranded in England when borders close.
Three years later, living on “the mung-protein-soy-algal flour distributed by the government” and cooking “shrinking supplies of frozen fish … reserved for kippers, or grey renditions of cod and chips”, her longing for “arugula, radicchio, the bitter green of endive” becomes overwhelming and she applies – “recklessly, immorally, desperately” – for a job as “private chef for what advertised itself as an elite research community on a minor mountain at the Italian-French border”.
