Publisher's Synopsis
John Lanchester's award-winning debut novel is a diabolically clever ode to our love of food, which has at its heart one of the most seductive and sinister characters in fiction.
John Lanchester's astonishing first novel is narrated by the impeccably correct Tarquin Winot, who relates the story of his life through the most basic and sublime of human passions: food. An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin embarks on a journey of the senses as he peels away the layers of his past. Wickedly funny and poisonously opinionated, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light as the truth becomes unavoidable.
