The Last Days of Cafe Leila by Donia Bijan

Donia Bijan’s The last days of Café Leila (The Café, 2017) is like a wafting aroma of your mother’s sambhar or pulao, exciting just in the right balance of anticipation and contentment — anticipation of new intimacies through food and contentment of knowing what these intimacies bring. Nearly 300 pages long, this novel is the most recent offer from Bijan, familiar to most in San Fransisco for her famous restaurant, L’Amie Donia. Bijan, a graduate from Berkeley, has authored two works of fiction, the first being an autobiography entitled Maman’s Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen (Alongquin, 2011).