Viper Wine - Hardcover

Eyre, Hermione

3.3

897 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0224097598 ISBN 13: 9780224097598

Publisher: Jonathan Cape, 2014

View all copies of this ISBN edition:

Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize

At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice.

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. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it.

From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of 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.

Shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.