The Cook

Power through service, says Head Chef. It’s one of the first lessons taught at Cook School, where troubled youths learn to be master chefs by bowing to decadence and whim, by offering up a part of themselves on every plate.

It’s a motto Zac takes to heart. A teenage boy with a difficult past, he throws himself into the world and work of haute cuisine. He has dreams of a future, of escaping the dead-end, no-hope lot of his fellow cooks. He wants to be the greatest chef the world has seen. He thinks he’s taken his first steps when he becomes House Cook for a wealthy family. Never mind that the family may seem less than appreciative. Or refined. Or deserving. Power through service.

But as the facade crumbles and his promised future looks unlikely to eventuate, Zac the Cook is forced to reassess everything. Sweet turns sour and ends in bitter revenge.

Blackly funny and deliciously satirical, The Cook feeds our hunger to know what goes on in the kitchen, while skewering our culture of food worship.

Listen to a review of The Cook on ABC’s The Book Show.

Listen to Wayne Macauley talk about The Cook, its themes, characters and the need for readers to believe the voice of the narrator.

Praise for The Cook:

‘Irresistible—The Cook reminds us just how exciting it is to read a wonderful and original novel.’

Lloyd Jones

‘On the surface this novel plays on our obsession with reality TV, fame and in particular cooking shows such as MasterChef. But as you read on it becomes apparent that questions of class, aspiration and success are at the heart of this complex, nuanced book…This is a black parable on contemporary society.’

Tim Coronel, Bookseller+Publisher

‘Blackly funny and deliciously satirical, this book skewers our culture of food worship while feeding our curiosity about kitchens.’

Age (Melbourne) Magazine

‘Reading The Cook is an intense experience, like stepping into a steamy, industrial kitchen, with pots boiling over on every surface…consistently hilarious.’

Daily Telegraph

‘This brilliant and richly layered book by Melbourne author Wayne Macauley is almost impossible to put down…For Macauley is writing about nothing less than the social, cultural and moral excesses of late capitalism: about the logical absurdities of conspicuous consumption, the decadence of “fine dining” and the contemporary obsession with cooking.’

Sydney Morning Herald

‘This is a novel that punctuates the fine life, eviscerates food wankery and highlights the emptiness and decay of the distracted and wealthy… Macauley has so effectively captured the voice of Zac, who believes this is the life he wants, when the dream starts to unravel we are immersed in Zac’s delusion along with him.’
Listen to the full review here.

Rachel Edwards, The Book Show

‘The Cook is a confident and potent piece of work. With its claustrophobic first-person narration and its appealing combination of black humour and broad comedy…Macauley has crafted an unmistakably unmistakably Australian voice for Zac. There are no commas in The Cook. Zac’s sentences tumble forth, run into each other, only to be bluntly terminated. Each enacts a small tussle between his observant nature and his laconic demeanour. One of the novel’s most impressive achievements is its creation of a droll, readable, vernacular prose, which is not only rhythmically insistent but able to hint at the tension and the instability beneath its apparently detached and affectless surface.’
Read the full review here

Weekend Australian

‘In the past few years, Wayne Macauley has published some of the most memorable fiction going in this country. His books and stories are satirical fables in which the properties are recognisably contemporary and Australian, indeed Melburnian, but his use of them is carefully distanced from realism and he has a prose style of remarkable poise and control that can allow his narratives to take off into the bizarre without ever losing their cool. Beneath that cool is a steady anger at the depredations of late capitalism, at the attempts of laissez-faire to turn us all into Homo economicus or addicted consumers… This is Macauley’s longest novel so far and marks a brilliant development in his dark vision of the way we live.’

Sunday Age

‘A riot of a book! Gripping and subversive…’

Nick Cave