From a dazzling new writer, a stirring memoir rooted in Hakka culture about the lesson to accept both bitterness and sweetness in life.

Eat bitter is a Chinese proverb meaning ‘endure hardship to taste sweetness.' For Lydia Pang, it embodies the struggles of her Hakka ancestors, a Chinese ethnic group subjected to forced migrations whose ingenuity produced a distinct food culture based on fermenting and foraging. Pang reimagines eating bitter as a philosophy to confront her own challenges: burning out, testing her marriage, navigating fertility struggles and caring for a parent. Through eight recipes, she shares food as memory and medicine: the silly egg noodles her father cooked when her sister was ill, the bone broth she boiled in New York while homesick and courgettes grown in rural Wales as a gesture of reconnection.

Comprising the satire and darkness of Netflix's "Beef", the tender insight of CRYING IN H MART, and the distinct magic of Ella Risbridger's MIDNIGHT CHICKEN, EAT BITTER is a very special book from a brilliant new voice and creative talent.