The Taste of Calvin's Soul

Galvin Ray is a legendary master of emotional cuisine. He does more than simply extract emotions: he is an artist who can precisely separate, blend, and cook up the most complex and pure emotional experiences to satisfy the increasingly particular demands of high society. His signature ingredient is “authenticity,” a flavor all but extinct in a world awash in artificial and synthetic emotions.

Yet Galvin’s talent stems from a deeply buried secret. He can sense and extract emotions because there is a “void” in his own soul, an inborn emotional blind spot. It lets him handle other people’s feelings with a surgeon’s cool precision, while leaving him unable to truly experience their depths.

When a mysterious and immensely powerful customer named Anya places the ultimate order, demanding to taste an emotion called “Absolute Nothingness,” Galvin faces the greatest challenge of his career, and perhaps of his very existence. There is only one ingredient: his own untouched soul.

The order sends Galvin down a road from which there is no return. To create “Nothingness,” he must first completely dismantle himself and confront the past he has always avoided, his fragile bonds with others, and the ethical abyss at the heart of his profession. Along with Lila, his assistant, who is trapped by emotional trauma; Marcus, a skeptical investigator from the Emotional Hygiene Bureau; and Anya, the mysterious customer whose motives go far beyond a taste for fine cuisine, he is drawn into an increasingly dangerous game.