Product details
- ISBN 9780008749484
- Weight: 220g
- Dimensions: 129 x 198mm
- Publication Date: 21 May 2026
- Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
- Publication City/Country: GB
- Product Form: Paperback
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‘A wonderful book.' Cathy Rentzenbrink
‘A remarkable tale’ The Spectator
A giant wheel of Comté – a cheese full of delight, a mosaic of flavour – can sometimes become flat. Despite all that’s gone into making it and caring for it, its complexity mysteriously vanishes, its spark dies. Cheesemongers know that. That’s why they regularly test the cheeses: they insert a cheese iron deep into the wheel and extract a sample from its core. Sometimes they can cure it and sometimes they can’t.
A highly successful BBC and Guardian Journalist, somehow Michael Finnerty's life had become flat. His psychological cheese iron told him he needed to make a change, and he becomes convinced his salvation lies in cheese. Michael becomes an apprentice cheesemonger at Borough Market, and is plunged into a world of intense physicality, extraordinary knowledge, and total geeky passion. From learning the cheese's personal nighttime riders – Castillon Frais needs to sit in its box underneath some waxed paper but its box needs to be kept in a plastic sheath, Comté sits unwrapped in a cool cupboard, and has a quick saline bath before bed – to learning intricate ways to wrap their different shapes; from being able to taste nuances between the cheeses, to slicing fingers, bruising toes, getting allergic reactions, and the simple dog-tiredness of being on your feet from the crack of dawn till night, Michael's new job is more demanding than he could ever have imagined – and he loves it. Then when Borough Market is subjected to a terrifying attack, Michael realises through cheese, he has found something even more powerful – community.
Michael Finnerty is a London-based cheesemonger, writer and journalist. He spent 15 years at the BBC and the Guardian – several of them reporting the world for the BBC World Service – before becoming a breakfast radio presenter for CBC in Montreal. His transition to cheesemonger was the result of a life-changing sabbatical at Borough Market, prompting him to hang up the microphone and don an apron. He believes that artisan cheeses are so much a product of human history and ingenuity, terroir and alchemy, art and science, they become imbued with a living spirit.
