Playing Sardines - a game in the dark, a game about desire, about wanting, all whipped up in a tale about the erotic allure of recipes: a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists working out how to deal with a husband who snores; a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle; a child greedy for love who faces up to her demon of jealousy - just some of the characters who shape this wonderful collection.
Women yearning for what they haven't got - prepared to be wily, deceptive, cunning and perverse - all these strategies for survival in love and life are deployed here to mouth-watering effect.

* Advertising campaign in THE TIMES and MAIL ON SUNDAY * Author PR activity to include media interviews and appearances at literary festivals * Review coverage in the national press and women's magazine's * Submitted for trade promotions * Featured on the Virago website www.virago.co.uk * Reading copies available

About the Author
Half-English and half-French, Michele Roberts was born in 1949. DAUGHTERS OF THE HOUSE (1992) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award.

Reviews
Michele Robert s' collection of short stories, which starts with the titular Playing Sardines is a wickedly gorgeous concoction of the sweet, bittersweet and downright sickly. Roberts has created each female narrator or heroine with as much care as any cook measuring out the ingredients for a rich chocolate mousse, and though not all the stories take food as their main theme, they leave the reader just as sated. Not surprisingly, France--its countryside, its cooking, Paris--takes a lead role in the stories, whether eating cordon bleu food from the perspective of a naive young English bride or roaming the streets of Paris seen through the older eyes of a 60-year-old. Stories which do dwell less on food, such as "Blathering Frights" and "A Bodice Rips" blackly and yet gently mock Robert s' own profession; creative writing courses and romantic novels are turned inside out with little twists of plot and extended metaphors. * Michele Roberts has a light touch that makes these stories very readable, and her subtly insinuating tone makes the mockery and morbidity all the more horrific after each story has finished. Playing Sardines is a literary dish to be appreciated in small b *
Written in a prose as sharp as a Sabatier knife. * GUARDIAN *



Book Information
ISBN 9781860499357
Author Michele Roberts
Format Paperback
Page Count 208
Imprint Virago Press Ltd
Publisher Little, Brown Book Group
Weight(grams) 239g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 126mm * 10mm