The Debt To Pleasure - Picador Classic (Paperback)

John Lanchester (author), John Banville (author of introduction)

£9.99

Paperback 240 Pages
Published: 01/01/2015

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Synopsis Authors

With an introduction by John Banville

To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death.

Tarquin Winot - hedonist, food obsessive, ironist and snob - travels a circuitous route from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his cottage in Provence. Along the way he tells the story of his childhood and beyond through a series of delectable menus, organized by season. But this is no ordinary cookbook, and as we are drawn into Tarquin's world, a far more sinister mission slowly reveals itself . . .

Winner of the 1996 Whitbread First Novel Award, John Lanchester's The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food; an erotic and sensual culinary journey. Its elegant, intelligent and unhinged narrator is nothing less than a work of art himself.

Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1996.

Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 9781447275381
Number of pages: 240
Weight: 184 g
Dimensions: 198 x 130 x 17 mm

MEDIA REVIEWS

The chilling, deluded Tarquin is the best character to come out of an English novel since Charles Dickens put pen to paper - Tatler

Reading between the lines to discover what Tarquin is up to is enormous, sinister fun . . .dazzling, languidly brilliant, his verbal flourishes are irresistible - James Walton, Daily Telegraph

A fully achieved work of art . . .a triumph. You have to salute the real thing. The Debt to Pleasure is a major work, a supreme literary construct that's also deliriously entertaining. Even the recipes are gorgeously seductive; several pages of my copy are flecked with stains of ragu and ratatouille to mark the moments when I could stand temptation no more - John Walsh, Independent

Coruscatingly, horribly funny . . . a cunning commentary on art, appetite, jealousy and failure. Tarquin is a splendid creation, genuinely learned (the scholarship is dazzling), poisonously bigoted and wholly mad - John Banville, Observer

Entertaining, crafty and insouciantly macabre . . . a glittering performance that . . . provides the pleasure that comes from good writing. The Debt to Pleasure is Nabokovian in its wrynessand delight with words - New York Times