Debt to Pleasure

Winner of the 1996 Whitbread First Novel Award

To like something is to want to ingest it and, in that sense, is to submit to the world; to like something is to succumb, in a small but contentful way, to death.

Tarquin Winot--hedonist, food obsessive, ironist and snob--travels a circuitous route from the Hotel Splendide in Portsmouth to his cottage in Provence. Along the way he tells the story of his childhood and beyond through a series of delectable menus, organized by season. But this is no ordinary cookbook, and as we are drawn into Tarquin's world, a far more sinister mission slowly reveals itself...

Winner of the 1996 Whitbread First Novel Award, John Lanchester's debut novel The Debt to Pleasure is a wickedly funny ode to food and an erotic, sensual culinary journey. Its elegant, intelligent and unhinged narrator is nothing less than a work of art himself.

Now part of the Picador Collection, a series showcasing the very best of modern literature.