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
Hermione Eyre is a journalist and former croupier. She read English at Hertford College, Oxford and was a staff writer and TV critic at the Independent on Sunday for seven years, then chief interviewer at the London Evening Standard Magazine. This is her first novel.
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.
*Independent on Sunday*
Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th
century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.
*Observer*
Playful, witty and expansive... An exceptionally clever and
exhilarating excursion through Caroline high society.
*Sunday Times*
A genre-defying debut novel... Vivid and vivacious – hats off to
Eyre.
*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.
*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…
*Sunday Telegraph*
A wickedly funny parable of today's beauty industry... Descriptive
brilliance and breathtaking cleverness.
*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.
*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.
*Harper's Bazaar*
Eyre has written a sumptuous, sensual tale of beauty and vanity;
it's crying out for a TV adaptation.
*Bookseller*
Magical realism meets a seventeenth-century Portrait of a Marriage.
To say it is dazzling would be a puritan understatement.
*Tom Holland, author of 'Rubicon' and 'Persian Fire'*
Persistently bizarre, fecund, technically inventive, funny – and
oddly touching.
*Jonathan Meades*
Viper Wine richly evokes Elizabethan and Jacobean language and is
alert to the plight of Catholics under Elizabeth I and King James,
while at the same time putting a post-modernist spin on the tight
and enthralling plot. I used to be dubious about alchemy and
antiquarianism, but the wit and excitement of this first novel
breathes new life into them.
*Tom Paulin*
[A] cornucopia of a novel.
*Daily Mail*
As funny as it is surreal.
*Financial Times*
This funny and exciting novel takes a fresh look at life during the
excitement and danger of the 17th century.
*Catholic Herald*
The language is beautiful, creating fantastic images with her
descriptions.
*Bookmunch*
Eyre’s prose is sensuous and rich… Her recreation of the period is
persuasive and alluring.
*Independent on Sunday*
A pacy, cleverly postmodern historical novel... Viper Wine is a
high-flying, high-concept mix that stylishly transmutes its wildly
disparate elements into an assured, flamboyant gem.
*Metro*
A mad, psychedelic romp through some of history’s most fertile
ground... The author’s voracious enthusiasm for eclectic,
highly-researched detail is persistently entertaining, breathing
new life into the genre of the historical novel. A real tonic.
*Country Life*
Clever, lively and playful... [An] impressive first novel.
*Tablet*
A dazzling debut… Wickedly funny.
*ELLE Decoration*
This dazzling firework of a debut novel is a reminder of how
inventive and original historical fiction can be.
*Irish Times*
Eyre pulls off a notable trick in Viper Wine, not just by
reconstructing her chosen period but rendering it permeable to
intrusions from other ages… Playful moments…are made all the more
striking by being woven unannounced into a meticulously luscious
fantasia on a theme of English high life in the 1630s.
*Times Literary Supplement*
The horrors of the beauty industry are taken apart with feline wit
and the book will make you purr with pleasure.
*New Statesman*
The most richly fruited post-modern novel since Jeanette
Winterson’s Sexing the Cherrys
*Independent*
A bold, impressive debut
*Daily Telegraph*
As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved
herself an author well worth watching out for
*Nudge*
As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved
herself an author well worth watching out for
*Nudge*
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