Pastry chef Saïd M'Dahoma champions Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew
Canada Reads will air March 17-20 on CBC TV, CBC Radio and CBC Books
Pastry chef Saïd M'Dahoma is championing the memoir Dandelion by Jamie Chai Yun Liew on Canada Reads 2025!
M'Dahoma is a neuroscientist turned pastry chef who shares his skills on social media as The Pastry Nerd.
The great Canadian book debate will take place on March 17-20. This year, we are looking for one book to change the narrative.
The debates will be hosted by Ali Hassan and will be broadcast on CBC Radio One, CBC TV, CBC Gem, CBC Listen, YouTube and CBC Books. Canada Reads airs at 10 a.m. ET (11 a.m. AT, 1:30 p.m. NT) on CBC Radio One and 1 p.m. ET (2 p.m. AT, 2:30 p.m. NT) on CBC TV. You can tune in live or catch a replay on the platform of your choice.
A sweet career change
M'Dahoma is a French Comorian Canadian pastry chef based in Calgary. M'Dahoma was born in Paris, where he completed his PhD in neuroscience, and moved to Canada to work at the University of Alberta.
Living so far from home, he began to miss French Comorian dishes and pastries, so he started trying to make his own. Through trial and error and by sharing his journey online, he decided to give up his career as a neuroscientist and become a pastry chef full-time.
He shares his skills on television, including shows like The Good Stuff with Mary Berg, and with his online following of more than 200,000. M'Dahoma was named as one of the Top 20 Compelling Calgarians of 2025.
A book about belonging
M'Dahoma is excited to champion Dandelion on Canada Reads because of its big plot, emotions and engaging characters.
Dandelion is a novel about family secrets, migration, isolation, motherhood and mental illness. When Lily was a child, her mother, Swee Hua, walked away from the family and was never heard from again. After becoming a new mother herself, Lily is obsessed with discovering what happened to Swee Hua.
She recalls growing up in a British Columbia mining town where there were only a handful of Asian families and how Swee Hua longed to return to Brunei. Eventually, a clue leads Lily to southeast Asia to find out the truth about her mother.
Jamie Chai Yun Liew is a lawyer, law professor and podcaster based in Ottawa. Dandelion is her first novel, which won her the Jim Wong-Chu Emerging Writers Award from the Asian Canadian Writers' Workshop. She also wrote the nonfiction book Ghost Citizens. Liew was named one of CBC Books writers to watch in 2022.
"I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place. I wrote about it academically in terms of how the law creates foreigners, but I wanted to explore how that feels — what that does to the psyche, how that affects someone's mental health," Liew told CBC Books.
I wanted to explore themes of belonging and place from an emotional place.- Jamie Chai Yun Liew
"There are a lot of assumptions about why people are stateless and the first one is that they are foreigners or migrants."
"And some stateless people are, but a lot of stateless people — millions around the world — are living within their home countries and overwhelmingly people told me, 'I'm being treated like a foreigner in my own country.'"
