Dive in for a lip-smacking good time

About a ghostwriter striving to be seen, food writer Adam Roberts' debut novel is a satisfying, high-calorie read

- Cherie Lok

FOOD PERSON By Adam Roberts Fiction/Hutchinson Heinemann/ Hardcover/320 pages/$34.95 ★★★★★ Midway through the novel Food Person, protagonist Isabella Pasternack goes shopping. Her jaunt through this garden of earthly delights begins with a stop at a voguish fashion boutique, where she trades 10-year-old ratty jeans, a moth-bitten sweater and holey sneakers for a "positively diaphanous" silk maxi dress.

"You look like you, but better," the salesman tells her.

It is a gratifying, if fleeting, peak in her pursuit of visibility. Isabella is introduced to readers as a shy and skittish nobody on the bottom rung of her digital food magazine. A chocolate souffle disaster broadcast live on Instagram costs her her job, and she pivots reluctantly to writing a cookbook for has-been actress Molly Babcock, whose career has been spiked with scandal.

She approaches this gig with modest hope: to get her name on the cover, to get some writing experience under her belt and, above all, to whip up a cookbook far better than anyone expects it to be. In short, to write herself out of anonymity.

There is just one problem. She is the ghost writer, consigned to being a vessel for other people's voices and ideas.