The Color Master

The New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a Richard and Judy bookclub pick, returns with a wonderful collection of enchanting, strange and magical stories.

A mix of modern fairy tales from the LA-based author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake ... Bender is a bold writer; her stories unpredictable and exciting.

I adore her style of writing and the way she views the world.

Aimee Bender spins the surreal wheel of human experiences and comes up with the enchanting story collection The Color Master.

Full of humor, wit, and pathos, The Color Master is the work of a writer with a strong, distinctive point of view, and with enough confidence to let it lead her into fresh and exciting places.

Aimee Bender is at her wickedly best in her latest short-story collection, with tales both dark and comic.

With her magical writing, Bender creates extraordinary tales ... that never take you where you think they will.

Aimee Bender is the author of the novels The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a New York Times bestseller, and An Invisible Sign of My Own; and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into sixteen languages. She lives in Los Angeles

The New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, a Richard and Judy bookclub pick, returns with a wonderful collection of enchanting, strange and magical stories. 
 
In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex and family – while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband in ‘The Red Ribbon’ and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre in ‘The Devouring’ and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. ‘Tiger Mending’ follows two sisters who travel deep into Malaysia where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds, and in the title story, 'The Color Master', a company of tailors endeavour to capture the colours of the sun, moon and sky. 
 
Evocative, funny, sad and beautifully written, The Color Master cements Aimee Bender’s reputation as one of the most imaginative and exciting writers of our time.

Willful Creatures

A fantastical collection of stories from the New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

I am a long-standing passionate fan of Aimee Bender's stories. Her images explode, her words ignite.

Contemporary fairy tales … and a deep tenderness for her characters, that aren’t always as dark or as sinister as they initially appear.

To curl up with an Aimee Bender story is to thank heaven you ever learned to read in the first place.

New, exciting, harsh, rugged and unyielding … Every sentence … is a fresh surprise.

[Bender] is Hemingway on an acid trip; her choices are twisted, both ethereal and surprisingly weighty … Terrifyingly lovely.

Her imagination packs all the gleaming surreality of a Magritte painting, her wry tone the poker-faced irony of a Haruki Murakami novel, her furious satire the bite of a Lynda Barry cartoon. The stories in Willful Creatures delight even as they unsettle.

Aimee Bender is the author of two novels, An Invisible Sign of My Own and the New York Times bestseller, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and two collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles. Read more about Aimee Bender and her work at www.flammableskirt.com

In Willful Creatures Aimee Bender takes us on a journey to a fantastical world in which authentic love blossoms. This is a place where a boy with keys for fingers is a hero, a family of pumpkin heads embrace their ironhead son and potato-children dotingly follow their mother around as she completes her daily chores. With the mix of charm and keenly felt emotion that characterised her New York Times bestseller The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Bender once again proves herself to be a masterful chronicler of the human condition.

The Girl in the Flammable Skirt

A fabulous collection of stories available in the UK for the first time from New York Times bestselling author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

Aimee Bender’s debut short-story collection shows a writer ready to flirt with the fantastical. Largely concerned with the love lives of young metropolitans and desperate housewives, her cheerily bizarre scenarios give romance a fresh twist … Bender is a writer with a very incendiary turn of phrase.

These stories are unusual, certainly and they take you inside people’s feelings. Bender gets you to see the world in very particular ways. Beautifully done; you won’t forget this.

Many of the stories in The Girl in the Flammable Skirt, begin with a premise just on the fringe of the familiar, then give it a tantalising twist ... Bender's stories are powered be voice - by pleasure of an electric simile and a restrained sauciness

Makes you grateful for the very existence of language

Bender has hit the ground running with this debut

Magical … a collection of mesmerisingly imaginative tales

AIMEE BENDER is the author of two novels, An Invisible Sign of My Own and the New York Times bestseller, The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, and two collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Willful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles. Read more about Aimee Bender and her work at www.flammableskirt.com

In The Girl in the Flammable Skirt Aimee Bender has created a world where nothing is quite as it seems. From a man suffering from reverse evolution to a lonely wife who waits for her husband to return from war; to a small town where one girl has a hand made of fire and another has one made of ice. These stories of men and women whose lives are shaped and sometimes twisted by the power of extraordinary desires take us to a place far beyond the imagination.

An Invisible Sign of My Own

From the author of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, the story of one woman's attempt to prove that life really does count....

Intelligent and engaging ... [A] fanciful and original take on the quietly helter-skelter world that lies within

An achingly idiosyncratic story rendered with eloquence, hilarity, and ominous precision

Light as a zephyr and unique as a snowflake

Fantastic! Bender has a perfect pitch. Her stories are fierce and true

Clever, original and written with brio and eloquence... Bender writes like an angel, with images that strike resonant chords, and her sly humour pervades every page.

This mesmerizing novel places a mathematical mind, poet's imagination, and voodoo queen's superstition in an athlete's body and sets to work, in a town stark as a blackboard, on the problem of Death. Pitting axes against angst, kids against cancer, soap against sex, wax numbers against depression, and love against the certainty of the beloved's doom, Aimee Bender nevertheless arrives--with wit, grace, and proof (that math is funny)--at compassion

David James Duncan, author of The Brothers K and River Teeth

Aimee Bender writes in a skillfully minimal way, everything very tight and poignant and sharp and often burning, quick to get to things and out of them, but still providing us with significant characters of emotional depth

Stephen Dixon, author of Frog and 30: Pieces of a Novel

AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novel The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Wilful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles. Read more about Aimee Bender and her work at www.flammableskirt.com.

When Mona Gray is ten, her father contracts a mysterious illness. His gradual withdrawal from everyday life marks a similar change in Mona, who removes herself from anything - or anyone - that might bring her happiness. Numbers provide a kind of solace, and help her make sense of the world: she counts words in her head, adds her steps, and multiplies people in the park against one another. As a maths teacher, Mona delights her pupils by encouraging them to find objects that take the form of numbers. But when seven-year-old Lisa appears with a zero that displays real turmoil, Mona knows that in order to help a person in pain, she needs to find a way to connect with the world she has been afraid of for so long. 
 
An Invisible Sign of My Own is a story about children and adults, and how we protect ourselves from the things we fear the most. It is about superstition and logic and the big muddy area in between. Written with the same eloquence and flair that characterisesThe Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, this novel marks the sign of a unique talent in contemporary fiction.

The heartwarming Richard and Judy Book Club favourite

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake

The unforgettable bestselling story of a girl whose magical gift becomes a devastating curse

A book with such beautiful writing that sometimes I have to stop and taste a sentence a second time

A wonderful metaphor for the child's sense of things that are never mentioned, and Bender writes with wit, warmth and insight

Quirky, engaging tale of a family endowed with unlikely gifts, the ties that bind people barely conceal the chasms that divide them

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake has at its heart an intriguing and poignant comment on the perils of childhood ... Bender brilliantly dovetails Rose's condition into a parable of the dangers of knowing too much about people, especially your family ... it is fresh and beautifully written

A beguiling, offbeat book that reads like a poem

Intense, strange and incredibly moving, it captures the magic and the romance of the unknown. With nods to both Chocolat and The Time Traveler's Wife, this is a beautifully written book and one that you will want to talk about long after you have finished reading it.

A lovely book, warm and comforting with moments of sadness and brilliantly written

Haunting... Bender's prose delivers electric shocks...  Moving, fanciful and gorgeously strange

[Bender] careens splendidly through an obstacle course of pathological, fantastical neuroses...  brimming with a zesty, beguiling talent

Bender is the master of quiet hysteria... She builds pressure sentence by sentence

A truly unique exploration of turbulent family relationships and a young girl on the cusp of adulthood grappling with grown-up emotions.

The book initially reads like the familiar tale of a cosy, suburban middle-class LA household concealing frustrated lives behind an outwardly-cheery veneer. But by kicking the narrative left with the surrealist twist of Rose's psychic tastebuds it becomes so much more: an unpredictable meeting of modern magic and melancholic realism.

The book I wish I had written ... it's so clever

Aimee Bender has got that cool, quirky American thing going on. Taking an unlikely premise - a girl who discovers she can taste emotions in food - she transforms it into a lovely, lonesome universal tale.

This is a moving and fantastical tale of the secrets and lies that lurk beneath the surface of a seemingly happy family.

It's a charming, funny, wistful novel, with serious things to say about feelings people hide and the nature of true nourishment

Lose yourself in a fantastical gastronomical journey ... This novel explores familial love in an unexpected way, and you'll be hooked from the first taste

This emotional and moving tale blew us away with its beauty

It's as beautiful as it is strange. Bender writes such lyrical sentences, you pause over them in wonder. She has an unusual take on life; and makes even the ordinary extraordinary. It's a compulsive page turner. This book is already a best seller in America, and has been embraced by book clubs. I loved it. It's one of those books you don't want to finish - and even when you have - it stays in your mind. Bender has written three previous novels. I intend to savour them all

This novel, in the style of stories like Chocolat, is a dreamy feast of gorgeous writing ... Gently, beautiful, odd, this is a story to sip and savour

An intriguing premise for an original novel about a family and its relationships

Moving and highly original, this book will make you look at food in a whole new light

AIMEE BENDER is the author of the novel An Invisible Sign of My Own and of the collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt and Wilful Creatures. Her work has been widely anthologised and has been translated into ten languages. She lives in Los Angeles. Read more about Aimee Bender and her work at www.flammableskirt.com

_______________________________ 
On the eve of her ninth birthday, Rose Edelstein bites into her mother's homemade lemon-chocolate cake and discovers she has a magical gift: she can taste her mother's emotions in the slice. All at once her cheerful, can-do mother tastes of despair and desperation. Suddenly, and for the rest of her life, food becomes perilous. Anything can be revealed at any meal. 
 
Rose's gift forces her to confront the truth behind her family's emotions - her mother's sadness, her father's detachment and her brother's clash with the world. But as Rose grows up, she learns that there are some secrets even her taste buds cannot discern. 
 
The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake is about the pain of loving those whom you know too much about, and the secrets that exist within every family. At once profound, funny, wise and sad, this is a novel to savour. 
_______________________________ 
Now available to preorder: Aimee Bender's new novel, The Butterfly Lampshade

Aimee Bender

a beautifully written portrayal of a girl trying to understand her mother's mental illness.

[A] compact surrealist memory box of a novel. . . Its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static . . . I felt considerably more altered by the experience than I often am by novels that travel much further from their beginnings . . . One finishes the novel with the eerie sense that we too are objects who have slipped accidentally into being.

[A] dazzling rumination on time and mental illness ... Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognisable walkable world [and the] middle-class Los Angeles of backyards and hatchbacks, bus stops and craft shops, is overlaid with mythic events-modest miracles, observed by few, that expose a world of mystery. . . [Francie's] receptiveness to the marvels eddying around brightens every detail in a small, deeply felt life.

[A] poignant novel of love and mental illness.

FROM THE AUTHOR OF THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER THE PARTICULAR SADNESS OF LEMON CAKE - A RICHARD AND JUDY BOOK CLUB PICK 
 
LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD 
 
'The Butterfly Lampshade is an unflinching, empathetic portrayal of a childhood touched by mental illness. As always, Aimee Bender's respect for the child and the child within translates into wisdom and magic on the page.' Jing-Jing Lee, author of How We Disappeared 
 
On the night her mother is taken to a mental health hospital after a psychotic episode, eight year-old Francie is mesmerised by a lamp adorned with butterflies as she falls asleep. When she wakes, Francie sees a dead butterfly matching the ones on the lamp floating in a glass of water. She drinks it before anyone sees. Twenty-years later, Francie is compelled to make sense of that moment and two other incidents that have haunted her life. But how close are her memories to reality, and will she ever be free of them?

Aimee Bender

Praise for The Butterfly Lampshade

a beautifully written portrayal of a girl trying to understand her mother's mental illness.

[A] compact surrealist memory box of a novel. . . Its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static . . . I felt considerably more altered by the exp ...

[A] dazzling rumination on time and mental illness ... Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognisable walkable world [and the] middle-class Los Angeles of backyards a ...

a beautifully written portrayal of a girl trying to understand her mother's mental illness.

[A] compact surrealist memory box of a novel. . . Its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static . . . I felt considerably more altered by the exp ...

[A] dazzling rumination on time and mental illness ... Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognisable walkable world [and the] middle-class Los Angeles of backyards a ...

a beautifully written portrayal of a girl trying to understand her mother's mental illness.

[A] compact surrealist memory box of a novel. . . Its particular quality of stillness hums with so much mystery and intensity that the book never feels static . . . I felt considerably more altered by the exp ...

[A] dazzling rumination on time and mental illness ... Bender has a gift for rooting wonderfully inventive fables in a very recognisable walkable world [and the] middle-class Los Angeles of backyards a ...

Books by Aimee Bender

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