The Recipe for Revolution - by Carolyn Chute (Paperback)

About the Book

Nationally bestselling author and winner of the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, Carolyn Chute, returns with The Recipe for Revolution, a searing portrait of class, politics, and brewing social change

Book Synopsis

Nationally bestselling author and winner of the PEN New England Award for Literary Excellence in Fiction, Carolyn Chute, returns with The Recipe for Revolution, a searing portrait of class, politics, and brewing social change

It's September 1999 and the world is on the cusp of a new millennium. In rural Maine, Gordon St. Onge, known as "The Prophet", presides over his controversial Settlement, a place rumored to be a cult, where his many wives and children live off the grid and off the land. Out in greater America, Bruce Hummer, the aging CEO of multinational corporation Duotron Lindsey, lays off workers by the thousands. Meanwhile, the newest member of the Settlement, fifteen year old Brianna Vandermast, is fired up and ready for change. Disillusioned with the covert local militia, she and other Settlement teens form the True Maine Militia. Putting her visionary ideas into practice, Bree pens "The Recipe", an incendiary revolutionary document that winds up in the hands of wealthy elites, including Bruce Hummer.

When a chance drinking session during an airport layover brings Bruce and Gordon together, Hummer--in a confounding moment-- gives Gordon a mysterious brass key, one turn of which has the potential to make heads roll and spark the unrest that is stirring in Egypt, Maine. As word of "The Recipe" spreads, myriad factions of anti-corporate revolt from across the country arrive at The Settlement wanting to make Gordon their poster boy. Gordon soon finds himself at the center of an uprising, the effects of which ripple beyond Settlement life.

In The Recipe for Revolution Carolyn Chute portrays politics, class, love, and friendship with acuity and complexity, giving us a pulsating, relevant book for today's America.

Review Quotes

Praise for The Recipe for Revolution

New York Times Editors' Choice

"The events of the novel take place circa Y2K, but Chute's concerns seem very 2020: how reality is named, created, fragmented, trolled, distorted... the writing is often wicked gorgeous. And it's been her career long passion, this ongoing searing critique of profit's "god-sized system. In place of a traditional plot, Chute allows characters to slowly emerge, exert a kind of magnetic pull and then recede. It feels like the literary equivalent of a big choir with occasional soloist." --New York Times Book Review

"[C]haracters and relationships drive this novel with a fierce political vision that feels uniquely tailored for our times." --Booklist

"Essential reading. . . . [The] third volume in Chute's blistering series about the Settlement, a radical, politically incorrect collective of the disorderly and disaffected in rural Maine."--Kirkus Reviews

Praise for Treat Us Like Dogs and We Will Become Wolves

"Carolyn Chute is the James Joyce of the backcountry, a Proust of rural society, an original in every meaning of the word."--New York Times Book Review

"Quirky, intensely original...an intellectual page-turner...Chute combines strident political commentary with humor, surrealism, and inventive language... multilayered and complex, deeply critical of society but fiercely devoted to humans."--O Magazine

"Deeply felt, scorchingly funny."--Vanity Fair

"A 700-page piece of wonderful, infuriating, narrative energy...This is the work of a writer at the peak of her craft."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

"As always Chute's voice is smart, funny, and fired up about righting the wrongs of the world...fiery, impassioned, and unlike anything else you will ever probably read." --Boston Globe
"[Chute] writes like a wild animal--ferocious, playful--making mincemeat of contemporary mores. Plenty to gnaw on here."--More