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The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects

The Heart-Shaped Tin: Love, Loss, and Kitchen Objects

by Bee Wilson

W. W. Norton & Company ·2025 ·320 pages ·Culture
Near the Top
Near the Top
I Index
64/99
Near the Top

61/99

Critics

Near the Top

66/99

Readers

n/a

Scholars

88/99

Rating

34/99

Volume

52/99

Rating

81/99

Volume

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About This Book

A heartfelt exploration of how everyday objects take on deeply personal meanings in our lives. One August day, months after her marriage abruptly ended, a heart-shaped baking tin fell at Bee Wilson's the same one she had used to bake her wedding cake twenty-three years prior. This discovery struck a wave of emotions that propelled her in search of others who have invested kitchen objects with magical and personal properties. A favorite wooden spoon or a saltshaker inherited from a these and other items become powerful symbols of identity and memory, representing friendship, grief, love, superstition, safety, and political resistance. Crossing continents, cultures, and time periods, Wilson weaves her own family story into a wider narrative, highlighting objects such as a 5,000-year-old ancient Ecuadorian ceramic bottle used for drinking chocolate, hand-shaped kitchen tongs, vintage corkscrews, and her mother's silver-plated toast rack. Thoughtful, sharp, and beautifully written, The Heart-Shaped Tin is a profoundly moving examination of our relationship to the physical world—and the people around us—in an increasingly rational and secular age.


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Reviews

"Perhaps the most profound story here belongs to Jacob Chaim, who, during his years in a Nazi forced-labor camp, secretly crafted a small tin spoon that would come to affirm his sense of humanity ..."

Diane Cole· The Wall Street Journal Top of the Pile

"A book concerned with rummaging in other people's kitchen drawers might start to feel claustrophobic, but Wilson is careful to let the light in."

Kathryn Hughes· The Guardian Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"She found a wealth of...people, and she records their stories with care ..."

Katie Noah Gibson· Shelf Awareness Read review ↗ Top of the Pile

"Bee Wilson speaks for many in finding a particular comfort in objects associated with the kitchen ..."

Miranda France· Times Literary Supplement Read review ↗ Near the Top

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