Viper Wine - Softcover

Eyre, Hermione

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099581663 ISBN 13: 9780099581666

Publisher: Vintage, 2015

Synopsis

Nominated for the Folio Prize

Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. Stampedes follow her arrival in town. But as she approaches middle age, the attention turns to scrutiny. Her adoring husband Sir Kenelm Digby philosopher, alchemist and time-traveller wishes she would age naturally, but Venetia discovers a potent and addictive elixir of youth, Viper Wine. Set on the eve of the English Civil War, and based on a true story, this brilliant novel asks a very contemporary question: what is the cost of beauty?

'Dazzling' Observer

'Intoxicating' Independent on Sunday

'Wickedly funny' The Times

About this title

Review:

"Exuberantly inventive and intelligent... Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original." (Mail on Sunday)

"An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future." (Marcus Field Independent on Sunday)

"Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary." (Lucy Scholes Observer)

"Playful, witty and expansive... An exceptionally clever and exhilarating excursion through Caroline high society." (Nick Rennison Sunday Times)

"A genre-defying debut novel... Vivid and vivacious – hats off to Eyre." (Sebastian Shakespeare Tatler)

"Bold and wildly original, Viper Wine is an exuberantly witty play on the vanity and ghoulishness of the beauty industry, and a celebration of the unfading beauty of language... Hermione Eyre has injected new youth into the historical novel." (Frances Wilson Evening Standard)

"Hermione Eyre’s bold and satisfying debut...offers up a potent mixture of baroque intricacy and gothic horror. Like Laurent Binet’s HHhH... Viper Wine tries to tease out the tensions that exist when telling history as fiction. Eyre’s novel is stylistically a world away from Binet’s, but shows some of the same playfulness in its reworking of historical sources... The stylistic brio and technical invention on show here is truly impressive..." (John Gallagher Sunday Telegraph)

"A wickedly funny parable of today's beauty industry... Descriptive brilliance and breathtaking cleverness." (Melissa Katsoulis The Times)

"No account of [Van Dyck] has perhaps been so convincing as that in Viper Wine... As art history it’s deeply unorthodox – but as a postmodern portrait of a trend-setting painter in the midst of a comeback, it seems both thrillingly and entertainingly right." (Marcus Field Independent on Sunday)

"Almost 400 years after Venetia Stanley's death, little has changed. As an allegory of our ageing-obsessed generation, [Viper Wine] is hard to argue with." (Sam Baker Harper's Bazaar)

Book Description:

A richly evocative and playful story of beauty, vanity and addiction, set at a time when England was on the cusp between magic and science.

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage
• Publication date: 2015
• ISBN 10: 0099581663
• ISBN 13: 9780099581666
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448