Kitchen Venom

"[An] elegant novel of poisoned love and intimate violence . . . Sharp and funny . . . a beautifully polished performance."

-James Lakeman, The Times Literary Supplement

"[An] assured and intriguing novel . . . Hensher's prose manages to be both immaculate and suggestive."

-David Profumo, The Daily Telegraph

"Remarkable . . . a stately, inexorable pavane of yearning and violence."

-Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph

"[Hensher] is an intensely sophisticated writer, a critic of discernment and exquisite sensibility."

-John Walsh, The Independent

"Impressively stylish . . . written with a formal elegance, in counterpoint to the chaos of the characters' motivations."

-Russell Celyn Jones, The Financial Times

"Stunning; beguilingly complex."

-Charles Osborne, The Sunday Telegraph

"Set amongst the wigs and gowns of parliamentary officialdom, [Kitchen Venom] exposes the hidden tensions in apparently banal lives. The characterisation is incisive and the dialogue first-class."

-The Sunday Telegraph

"His House of Commons is as tightly run as a lunatic asylum, as baffling as Lewis Carroll's Wonderland . . .[the plot] is at first intriguing then wholly beguiling, twisting tight its threads of power, betrayal, lust and love."

-Michele Roberts, The Independent On Sunday

"A brilliant, hateful work . . . For what it's worth (and I did once work as a secretary to Margaret Thatcher) I think nobody has better described the trivial, as well as the grand, mechanisms of her mind."

-Matthew Parris, The Spectator

"Airy, felicitous, superintendent, Hensher releases his staggered secrets and recognitions in a smart but unpredictable procession of bad behaviours."

-Jeremy Maule, The Guardian