The Kitchens of Canton

“A wildly amusing and satirical premise sets the stage for a frenetic tale of time traveling and cross-cultural confusion.” — Chris Taylor, author of Harvest Season

“A dizzying, whirlwind tour across language, space and time…The Kitchens of Canton presents an eerie, if not implicative, vision of society’s future.” — Quincy Carroll, author of Up to the Mountain and Down to the Countryside

“A picture forms of Isham Cook after reading even just two or three sentences from any of his books. He delights in the excessive, the sensuous and the extravagant.” — Arthur Meursault, author of Party Members

“An insightful, unconventional, and risqué view of present-day culture.” — Kirkus Reviews

Jeff Malmquist is unaccountably catapulted to the year 2060. He finds himself in New Gary, Indiana, a labor camp of one million Chicagoans, their identities hacked and incriminated as pedophiles through the collusion of a corrupt US Government, the Russian cybermafia, and China. He escapes to Chicago, only to find himself in a full-scale replica of Ancient Rome in China, erected for the wealthy country’s amusement and manned by a million enslaved Italians. As he struggles to orient himself in these synchronized urban labyrinths, he is plunged back to real Ancient Rome, before being flung yet further into the future: It’s 2115 and the Chinese Empire rules the world. The former Western hemisphere is now the American Special Administrative Region, a vast Cantonese-speaking slave colony. Malmquist will soon be shipped to the most opulent city the world has ever known for an unspeakable fate.

A dystopian satire both bleak and funny, The Kitchens of Canton distills the worst of our present and future societies into a strangely seductive maze of a story.