Cooking with Fernet Branca

About this book

"A playful book full of fun and games. There is so much pleasure to be had from Hamilton-Patersons delight in language and wicked way with unreliable narrators. . . . The books effect is achieved almost entirely through the comic magnetism of a single character."-The Times Literary Supplement "A skillful highly original writer. . . . The elegant language witty asides and vivid observations are memorable."-The Literary Review "Im bowled over by the sheer imaginative brilliance of the man."-Barry Humphries "I love his elegant and intensely evocative style: strangeness lifts off his pages like a rare perfume."-J.G. Ballard "A work of comic genius."-The Independent "A wonderfully rich alloy of sub-Wildean witticisms and nonsense Cooking with Fernet Branca had me laughing out loud and uproariously."-Ian Thomson Sunday Telegraph Gerald Samper an effete English snob has his own private hilltop in Tuscany where he wiles away his time working as a ghostwriter for celebrities and inventing wholly original culinary concoctions-including ice cream made with garlic and the bitter herb-based liqueur of the books title. Geralds idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta on the run from a crime-riddled former soviet republic. A series of hilarious misunderstandings brings this odd couple into ever closer and more disastrous proximity. James Hamilton-Patersons first novel Gerontius won the Whitbread Award. He is an acclaimed author of nonfiction books including Seven-Tenths Three Miles Down and Playing with Water. He currently lives in Italy.