My Year of Meats

In a single eye-opening year two women, worlds apart, experience parallel awakenings. In New York, Jane Takagi-Little lands a job producing a Japanese television show sponsored by an American meat-exporting business, exposing some unsavoury truths - about the meat industry and herself. In Tokyo, housewife Akiko Ueno diligently prepares the recipes from Jane's programme. Struggling to please her husband, she increasingly doubts her commitment to the life she has fallen into.

As Jane and Akiko both battle to assert their individuality on opposite sides of the globe, they are drawn together in a startling story of strength, courage and love.

Review: Smart, funny, irreverent * * Guardian * *
There are not many novels that can justify the label "extraordinary" . . . It grapples with a quite astonishing pantheon of themes . . . The writing is witty, intelligent and passionate * * Independent * *
An amazingly assured debut, My Year of Meats is a wonderfully irreverent novel, with wacky cross-cultural collisions and hilarious characters . . . a joy to read * * Elle * *
Ozeki offers a remarkably fresh view of the rocky road many women travel to love and motherhood * * Glamour * *
Pulsates with passion . . . Ozeki's first novel detonates an attack on the meat industry that would make Upton Sinclair sit up and smile . . . yet all this energy doesn't obscure the novel's quirky charm * * USA Today * *
A meaty novel about relationships, cultural boundaries and the beef industry . . . Ruth Ozeki masks a deeper purpose with a light tone . . . delightful -- JANE SMILEY, author of A Thousand Acres

Prizes: Winner of Kiriyama Prize 1998 and Imus/Barnes & Noble American Book Award 1998.