The Debt To Pleasure

Description

Tarquin Winot, voluptuary and supercivilized ironist (and snob), sets out on a journey of the senses from the Hotel Splendide, Portsmouth, to his cottage in Provence, his spiritual home. With his head newly shaved and his well-thumbed copy of the Mossad Manual of Surveillance Techniques safely stowed, Tarquin elegantly introduces his life, itself a work of art, through the medium of seasonal menus.

John Lanchester was born in Hamburg in 1962. He has written four novels, The Debt to Pleasure (which won the Whitbread First Novel Award), Mr Phillips, Fragrant Harbour, and Capital, and two works of non-fiction: Family Romance, a memoir; and Whoops!: Why everyone owes everyone and no one can pay, a book about the global financial crisis. He is married, has two children and lives in London.

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 *