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Meera Ekkanath Klein

Meera Ekkanath Klein has combined her love of cooking and story-telling in her latest book Seeing Ceremony, a sequel to the award-winning My Mother’s Kitchen: A Novel with Recipes (Homebound Publications 2014). When she is not in the kitchen or at her computer, she can be found picking out the freshest produce and ripest fruit at the local Farmers’ Market.

Klein’s short stories and poems have been published in online and print magazines and she is a reviewer for the New York Journal of Book. She lives in Davis, CA with her husband and has two grown sons. 

award-winning

My Mother’s Kitchen: A Novel with Recipes

978-1938846700 |  Trade paperback | 5.5 x 8.5 | 270 pp |  List: $17.95

My Mother’s Kitchen is an enchanting place filled with promise, change and good food. If the weathered walls of this magical room could talk they would tell the story of Meena and her childhood life. Each chapter is a slice in her young life and depicts her spunk and youthful spirit. A visit to the local Fruit and Flower Show becomes an adventure as told by Meena. Her distress at finding out about her aunt’s dark secret or her joy of making a new friend are all told in her naïve, yet pure voice. Her mother is a central character in her life and it is no wonder that the kitchen is a special place of healing and rejuvenation, not only for Meena but for other characters like Kashi and Ayah. This feel-good sequel to the award-winning My Mother’s Kitchen is all about family, good food, love and finding the way back home.

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“A delicious read filled with delectable recipes.”

–Padma Venkatraman, award-winning author of Climbing the Stairs, Island’s End and A Time to Dance

“It makes perfect sense that recipes should slip into a story about life and its richness. They do so effortlessly, as it should be. I thoroughly enjoyed this lovely book about food, culture, and family in India. Adding the food element has the effect of making it somehow universal.”

–Deborah Madison, author of Vegetable Literacy and The New Vegetarian Cooking for Everybody

“…It’s packed with insights on Indian culture, cooking and eating, and will appeal across the board…It’s the smoky aromas of cooking and the culinary insights peppered liberally throughout which set My Mother’s Kitchen apart from most other novels about Indian culture and experience.”

–Midwest Book Review

“Meera Ekkanath Klein brings the rich flavors and the sumptuous tastes of India to life in her first book, My Mother’s Kitchen. …Klein offers easy-to-follow recipes and lifts the veil that has often concealed Indian life. Her memories of India, where she was born and raised, lifts this book far above the ordinary. A must-read for mothers and daughters eager to try new spices, My Mother’s Kitchen paints a portrait of an ancient culture of rare beauty and mouth-watering food.”

–Jonah Raskin, author of Field Days, A Year of Farming, Eating and Drinking Wine in California

Now available

Seeing Ceremony: A Novel with Recipes

978-1947003675 |  Trade paperback | 5.5 x 8.5 | 270 pp |  List: $17.95

This feel-good sequel to the award-winning My Mother’s Kitchen is all about family, good food, love and finding the way back home. Since the death of her husband three years ago, Meena’s mother has wanted to see her oldest daughter married and so she organizes Meena’s “seeing ceremony,” a ritual associated with arranged marriages. However, eighteen-year-old Meena is not ready to be married and wants to leave her hilltop home in Mahagiri, south India, and attend college in California. The ceremony is a disaster. Her four years in America soon comes to an end and Meena is eager to return home and share her newly-acquired knowledge of agriculture and tea production with her family. On her journey back to India, Meena meets handsome businessman Raj Kumar with whom she has an instant connection. They end up talking for hours in the airport lounge. When they part at the departure gate, Meena doesn’t think she’ll ever see Raj again. Back in Mahagiri, her mother faces a threat to her home and livelihood. Meena could avert this disaster by agreeing to an arranged marriage. Will Meena have to go through yet another “seeing ceremony?”

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Available in Paperback and ebook.
*Receive 20% off when you purchase in our store
+ Free shipping on orders over $40.00 with coupon code: INDIESTRONG

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“There’s a bravado in Meera Klein’s Seeing Ceremony, as expansive a courage as there is in eighteen-year old Meena, a daughter determined to reject an arranged marriage in tradition-bound Indian culture where elders match a groom by religion, profession, caste, and horoscope. To witness her own mother’s supportive objections to the ceremony is to know the limits of the heart’s misguided ties to repressive gender-based fealties. Only a father’s legacy of a spice plantation’s comforting presence inspires the primal force to pursue studies in America, a world-education beyond her own. Klein’s rhythmically mastered cadence follows Meena’s pilgrimage to independence with an extravagant feast of sensory imagery, from taro roots and the Keatsian-styled spice scents of biryami and cardamon to the metaphoric ritual of devotees walking Irumudi sacks up the 18 steps of the Ayappan Temple. Such is the universality of experience in Klein’s writing as aromas of food and exotic landscapes nurture those who inhabit Meena’s world of Mahagiri, from an aunty matchmaker to a fortune teller to a young man whose chance meeting impassions him to join Meena’s enlightened quest to rediscover change as the only thing that is constant. What a delightfully romantic excursion Klein makes of it. You will be seduced if not educated by the intertwining narratives of change as the primal force that brings her back to her beloved Mahagiri, a fertile place of hope and renewal, the very qualities that define this wondrous book.”
—James Ragan, author of The Hunger Wall and Too Long a Solitude
                                                                   
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“Seeing Ceremony is a rich coming of age novel, full of myth and legend, romance, and the heady tastes and scents of India. It is a love letter to both place and family–the ingredients that make home home. Meera Klein is a natural born story teller–I felt as if I were sitting at the kitchen table as she told me this story–and Seeing Ceremony is truly a feast for ALL of the senses. A true delight.
–Louise Miller, author of The Late Bloomers’ Club and The City Baker’s Guide to Country Living

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