Simple Recipes: Stories

by Madeleine Thien

A stunning collection of short stories, newly reissued, from a Booker–shortlisted and international best-selling author.


Longing, familiarity, and hope suffuse these stories as they mine the charged territory of relationships—subtly weaving in conflicts between generations and cultures. Madeleine Thien’s characters in some way want to make amends, to understand the events that have shaped their lives. A young woman searches back in time for the pivotal moment when her family lost faith in itself. Two sisters keep a vigil outside their former house, hoping their long-absent mother will appear one last time. A wife helps her husband grieve for the woman he has loved since childhood. A daughter remembers the simple ritual she once shared with her father and the moment when her unconditional love for him was called into question.


Compassionate and revealing, delicate and wise, the stories in Simple Recipes chart the uneven progress of love and lay bare the heartbreaking truths at the core of our closest bonds.

240 pages, Paperback

Expected publication September 15, 2026

About the author

Madeleine Thien was born in Vancouver. She is the author of the story collection Simple Recipes (2001), and three novels, Certainty (2006); Dogs at the Perimeter (2011), shortlisted for Berlin’s International Literature Prize and winner of the Frankfurt Book Fair’s 2015 Liberaturpreis; and Do Not Say We Have Nothing (2016), about musicians studying Western classical music at the Shanghai Conservatory in the 1960s, and about the legacy of the 1989 Tiananmen demonstrations. Her books and stories are published in Canada, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia, and have been translated into 25 languages.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing won the 2016 Scotiabank Giller Prize, the 2016 Governor-General’s Literary Award for Fiction, and an Edward Stanford Prize; and was shortlisted for the 2016 Man Booker Prize, the 2017 Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and The Folio Prize 2017. The novel was named a New York Times Critics’ Top Book of 2016 and longlisted for a Carnegie Medal.