Playing Sardines - Softcover

Roberts, Michele

3.51

117 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 186049935X ISBN 13: 9781860499357

Publisher: Virago, 2011

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Playing Sardines - a game in the dark, a game about desire, about wanting, all whipped up in a tale about the erotic allure of recipes: a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists working out how to deal with a husband who snores; a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle; a child greedy for love who faces up to her demon of jealousy - just some of the characters who shape this wonderful collection.
Women yearning for what they haven't got - prepared to be wily, deceptive, cunning and perverse - all these strategies for survival in love and life are deployed here to mouth-watering effect.

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Product Description:

Rare Book

Review:

Michele Roberts' collection of short stories, which starts with the titular Playing Sardines is a wickedly gorgeous concoction of the sweet, bittersweet and downright sickly. Roberts has created each female narrator or heroine with as much care as any cook measuring out the ingredients for a rich chocolate mousse, and though not all the stories take food as their main theme, they leave the reader just as sated. Not surprisingly, France--its countryside, its cooking, Paris--takes a lead role in the stories, whether eating cordon bleu food from the perspective of a naive young English bride or roaming the streets of Paris seen through the older eyes of a 60-year-old. Stories which do dwell less on food, such as "Blathering Frights" and "A Bodice Rips" blackly and yet gently mock Roberts' own profession; creative writing courses and romantic novels are turned inside out with little twists of plot and extended metaphors.

Michele Roberts has a light touch that makes these stories very readable, and her subtly insinuating tone makes the mockery and morbidity all the more horrific after each story has finished. Playing Sardines is a literary dish to be appreciated in small but perfect portions. --Olivia Dickinson

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