The ultimate in snarky, pompous narrators leads the reader through his own plot, liberally spiced with tempting recipes and twisty recollections of his own earlier life. The use of language, necessarily elevated with such a narrator, is a revelation, every sentence exactly as it should be. Brilliant. ( )

Unexpectedly funny. A good antidote if you've been reading too much euro-food porn or rapturous south of France getaway writing. I wondered how many of the quotations he slings around are true. I need to see what else he's written. ( )

A first novel by a literary journalist, which looks suspiciously as though it was written in response to a drunken challenge to incorporate the essential elements of as many stereotypical British bestsellers as possible into a single story. Cookery with recipes and menus, middle-class English people in rural France, artists, romance, servants, boarding-school, cottages in Norfolk, social snobbery, food snobbery, and — oh yes, I nearly forgot — a body-count that would put Midsomer to shame. All ruthlessly sent up via an appalling, unreliable narrator, very clever and often wickedly funny. The only thing Lanchester seems to have forgotten is that a novel like this should have a clergyman in it somewhere. Purists might also be disappointed to find that there's only one small scene of canine interest.

I'm not much of a foodie, so I suspect I missed some of the more subtle jokes, but this is obviously meant as a parody of those novels where you get a recipe in every chapter: our helpful narrator Tarquin never quite gets all the way through the essential details of a recipe before being distracted into telling us about something else, and you would probably get into a terrible mess if you were so silly as to try to reproduce any of his menus.

When it first appeared, this would have been an ideal Christmas present for those pretentious friends or relatives who are always going on about their cottage in France and the little restaurants they have "discovered" there. By now they've probably read it already, unfortunately, and they are more worried about Brexit and their 90 days than about aubergines or cheeses, but it's still good fun for a couple of hours. ( )

This cunning character study is not quite as funny as some people think it is, but that still leaves it quite a bit of room in which to be funny. The book's narrator, one Tarquin Minot, is a gourmand and snob whose obsession with crafting exquisite menus comes to serve as a metaphor for the sinister course of his life. Very arch and British in a Highsmith-meets-Wodehouse kind of way. ( )

This is a dazzling book, and all the more impressive in that it was John Lanchester’s first novel, although he had already established himself as a respected journalist and columnist. Beautifully written, it defies ready classification, hovering between high class cookbook, murder mystery and espionage handbook.

Self-appointed (indeed, self-anointed) aesthete Tarquin Winot regales his readers with mouth-watering descriptions of seasonal dishes while recounting various episodes from his life. It is only as the novel progresses that the reader comes to recognise that an unusually high proportion of Winot’s family, entourage and acquaintances seem to have met untimely and sudden deaths.

As we join Winot, he is embarking on a journey from Portsmouth to Provence where he arranges a "chance" encounter with a journalist who is attempting to write a biography of Winot's elder and more celebrated brother Bartholomew (more generally referred to as "Barry"), who has become an established artist and sculptor. Engineering this seemingly fortuitous encounter is fairly easy for Winot, as we come to learn that one of his favourite books, and one which accompanies him wherever he goes, is the "Mossad Guide to Secret Surveillance".

Tarquin has nothing but disdain for the unstructured output of his brother, or his all too proletarian habits, and does what he can to disillusion the biographer. While doing so, we see beautiful glimpses of Winot’s relatively opulent childhood, although even early on there are signs of deeply-rooted dysfunction. Winot’s descriptions of the meals that he recommends at different seasons, and his appreciations of the countryside through which he travels, are perfectly sumptuous.

In Tarquin Winot, John Lanchester has created a grotesque, yet oddly enticing, character, and the book is a joy to read (or, is in the current case, re-read with heightened – and not disappointed – anticipation). ( )