Viper Wine

Title: Viper Wine

Author: Hermione Eyre

Binding: Hardcover

EAN: 9780224097598

Condition: Good

Please note: Below is a general description of how we classify our condition types. If you would like a more precise picture or have specific questions, please send us a message and we will be happy to look into it for you.

Condition descriptions:
- As New: Hardly any signs of use, almost as new.
- Good: May show minor signs of use, such as some discoloration or a name on the endpapers, but generally no underlining or notes in the text.
- Fair: Book in fair condition. May show signs of use, such as discoloration, reading creases in spine, underlinings, notes, light soiling at edges, dog-ears, or a crooked spine.
- New: Book is new.

Description:
This book has been shortlisted for the 2015 Walter Scott Prize. At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her mid-climacteric approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waving. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby - alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller - believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it. From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia's black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.