Jesse Q Sutanto & Katie Campbell—'Ms Mebel Goes Back to the Chopping Block'

Third Place Books welcomes author Jesse Q. Sutanto to our Lake Forest Park store for a conversation about her new book, — a delicious tale of food, reinvention, and unexpected connections. KUOW Book Club host Katie Campbell joins in conversation.

"...Readers should derive much pleasure witnessing Mebel’s transformation from castoff wife into Chinese Indonesian Golden Girl. Soufflé lightness, deliciously flavored with feminism." —Kirkus Reviews

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A nearly divorced trophy wife enrolls in culinary school to win back her husband, only to find a fresh start in the unlikeliest of places in this new novel from the USA Today bestselling author of Vera Wong's Unsolicited Advice for Murderers.
Retirement should mean long-awaited trips to the sapphire waters of Santorini or careening down a sand dune in Dubai. For sixty-three-year-old Mebel, retirement means her husband of more than forty years announcing that he's leaving her for their private chef. Mebel isn’t sure who's the bigger loss.
Not to worry, Mebel has the perfect plan: she’s going to win back her husband. No one knows what he needs better than her—after all, she's been anticipating his needs their whole marriage. And if he wants a wife who can cook (why else would he leave her for a chef?), she will simply go to cooking school. And where better to learn to cook for your husband than France, the most romantic country in the world?
However, Mebel quickly learns that she has mistakenly enrolled in a culinary school not in glamorous Paris but rather in England—and in some small village outside of Oxford no less. Despite the less-than-warm welcome from her much younger classmates, Mebel manages to befriend Gemma, the breakout star of the program. And this unlikely friendship starts to show Mebel that maybe there’s more to her than being the perfect trophy wife…

Jesse Q. Sutanto is the award-winning, USA Today bestselling author of the Aunties and Vera Wong series along with several stand-alone thrillers. She grew up shuttling back and forth between Indonesia, Singapore, and Oxford, and considers all three places her home. She has a master’s degree from Oxford University and a bachelor’s from the University of California, Berkeley. Jesse currently lives in Jakarta with her husband and two young daughters.

Katie Campbell curates the KUOW Book Club, which she created in 2024. Katie features stories and authors from the Pacific Northwest, picking monthly titles, both fiction and non-fiction, and providing analysis along the way. She ends each reading with an author interview, giving readers a look behind the scenes from some of the most talented writers in the region. She also covers visiting authors and Seattle's literary scene on KUOW's arts podcast, Meet Me Here. Listen at https://www.kuow.org/podcasts/meet-me-here or wherever you get your podcasts.

Founded in 1998 in Lake Forest Park, Washington, Third Place Books is dedicated to the creation of a community around books and the ideas inside them. With locations in Lake Forest Park and Seattle's Ravenna and Seward Park neighborhoods, Third Place Books is proud to serve the entire Seattle metro area. Learn more about their event series at thirdplacebooks.com/events

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