The Debt to Pleasure

Review\n“A remarkable achievement.”
–Montreal Gazette\n“A fully achieved work of art…Lanchester writes so stunningly well that one finds oneself laughing out loud at the perfection of his effects…a triumph.”
–Independent (U.K.)\n“Dazzling.…This beautifully written, boldly self-indulgent book manages to instruct and amuse even as it appalls.”
–Globe and Mail\n“Diabolically clever.”
–Publishers Weekly\n“Coruscatingly, horribly funny…Lanchester writes with beady-eyed exactitude and a fine aphoristic wit…Tarquin is a splendid creation.”
–The Observer (U.K.)\n“A masterly debut from a writer whose gifts border on the demonic.”
–Chicago Tribune\n“As if Brillat-Savarin and Nabokov met for lunch at a quiet dining room off the Rue Morgue. Entertaining and unexpected.”
–Richard Bachmann, A Different Drummer Books\nJohn Lanchester's award-winning debut novel is a diabolically clever ode to our love of food, which has at its heart one of the most seductive and sinister characters in fiction.\nJohn Lanchester's astonishing first novel is narrated by the impeccably correct Tarquin Winot, who relates the story of his life through the most basic and sublime of human passions: food. An Englishman of indeterminate age whose spiritual home has always been France, Tarquin embarks on a journey of the senses as he peels away the layers of his past. Wickedly funny and poisonously opinionated, he proves himself a master of sly wit and subversive ideas. Under the guise of completing a cookbook, Winot is in fact on a much more sinister mission that only gradually comes to light as the truth becomes unavoidable.