The Debt To Pleasure
15 December 2014Imprint: Picador
Synopsis
With an introduction by John Banville
Winner of the Whitbread First Novel Award 1996.
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...
Details
15 December 2014240 pages
9781447275398Imprint: Picador
Reviews
The chilling, deluded Tarquin is the best character to come out of an English novel since Charles Dickens put pen to paperTatler
Reading between the lines to discover what Tarquin is up to is enormous, sinister fun . . .dazzling, languidly brilliant, his verbal flourishes are irresistibleJames 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 moreJohn 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 madJohn Banville, Observer
