Food novels inevitably make you hungry. Unlike cookbooks where brevity is favoured when relaying ingredients and method, fiction about food challenges the imagination with delectably-woven sentences. It's not a craft that can be easily perfected, and yet, any sincere attempt makes for a pleasurable read.

New Jersey-based food blogger Sandeepa Mukherjee Datta's debut novel, Those Delicious Letters (HarperCollins India), is one such experience. What begins as a story about Shubhalaxmi Sen-Gupta aka Shubha, working in a loss-making indie publishing enterprise in the US, while straddling life as wife and mother to teenagers, soon becomes a quest to connect with her homeland through food. The motivation comes from the epistles she accidentally starts receiving from a stranger. In the letters, the lady, who claims she is Shubha's didan (grandma in Bengali) from Kolkata, shares family recipes she grew up on, while doling out life lessons that shaped her. "The only solace in that month of torture and heartbreak was the ilish [hilsa]… that year the markets were flooded with shining varieties of ilish from the River Padma," didan recalls, while writing about the time, when her wedding date with a man she didn't love was looming closer. Her heart was elsewhere, and only the homemade bhapa ilish, calmed her anxious nerves. "It was a beautiful dish, with a play of sweet and sour that spoke of deep secrets," didan shares.