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The Bakers Dozen
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Apr 5 2026
Pages: 284
Weight: 0.84
Height: 0.60 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Thirteen orphans. One impossible kitchen. A future they will have to earn by hand.
When Eleanor and twelve other young people leave Cresswell House, they carry little more than worn coats, a few coins, and the promise that they will not abandon one another. London is wet, hungry, and indifferent-until the glowing windows of Maison Vauquelin offer them a glimpse of heat, order, and work.
They ask for a chance. What they receive is a trial.
In the scullery, coal room, larder, and pastry corner, the thirteen learn that a great kitchen is not built on glamour. It is built on blistered hands, ruined dough, broken sauces, bruised pride, and the discipline to begin again before anyone has time to comfort you. Eleanor learns that leadership can become control. Thomas learns that steadiness is not the same as silence. Finn learns when charm helps and when it gets in the way. Maria learns that beauty without structure cannot survive the oven. Liam learns that the quietest person in the room may be the one who sees the system most clearly.
As years of labor turn into skill, the dream changes. They no longer want only to survive inside someone else's kitchen. They want to build a table of their own-The Cresswell Table-where food is not merely displayed, but offered with memory, dignity, and care.
But opening a restaurant asks more than talent. It asks for money they barely have, trust they have not yet earned, and unity that cannot remain untested. Suppliers doubt them. Critics watch them. Old fears return. One bad service could prove every skeptic right.
The Baker's Dozen is a warm, character-driven historical novel for readers who love found family, atmospheric London settings, culinary apprenticeship stories, and novels about ordinary people turning work, loyalty, and hunger into something lasting.
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