Capers in the Sauce

Dec 1, 2025 10:09 PM

Author:Laura Lockington

Capers in the Sauce

All Livia really wants is for her life to be simple: she'd like to make her interior design business work, see lots of her friends, and maybe find a man - if she ever meets one who knows that Smeg is a brand of kitchen appliance and not a sexually transmitted disease. But events - or more specifically Livia's friends - conspire to keep her life complicated. What with Steve's secret liaison with 'vegetable girl', Mandy's insistence that Livia hosts a dinner party to help her snare the latest object of her rather fleeting affections, and the glamorous Zena's determination to hold a party to relaunch Livia's career, the simple life just isn't an option. And the antique pistol in the bottom of her wardrobe is the final straw.

Reviews

One of the best and funniest English authors alive

—— Independent

Like Jonathan Swift, Pratchett uses his other world to hold up a distorting mirror to our own, and like Swift he is a satirist of enormous talent... incredibly funny... compulsively readable

—— The Times

He would be amusing in any form and his spectacular inventiveness makes the Discworld series one of the perennial joys of modern fiction

—— Mail on Sunday

Stunning

—— The New Yorker

Takes us into the heart of the Hasidic community in New York, where two Hungarian-Romanian Jewish children orphaned during the barbarity of the Second World War are set to begin new lives

—— Elmore Leonard , Glasgow Sunday Herald

Fascinating... Offers a glimpse into the real world of Hasidic life

—— Kerstin Hoge

Outstanding novel

—— Benjamin Evans , Sunday Telegraph (Seven)

Using the language of the scriptures, Markovits depicts religion’s potential for both beauty and cruelty, and the inevitability of transgression even in the most devout life

—— Maria Crawford , Financial Times

The writing is stunning, the execution flawless and the plot utterly gripping (4 stars)

—— Helen Cullen , Stylist

An unusual, beautifully written novel

—— The Lady

A bittersweet rumination on first love ... The language soars, full of the beauty of nature and the sadness of loss

—— Marie Claire

Banville perfectly captures the spirit of adolescence, the body yearning for sexual experience, the mind blurring eroticism and emotion ... Banville is a Nabokovian artist, his prose so rich, poetic and packed with startling imagery that reading it is akin to gliding regally through a lake of praline: it's a slow, stately process, delicious and to be savoured ... This is a luminous breathtaking work

—— Independent on Sunday

Ancient Light also bears resemblance to Lolita that extend beyond the obvious hallmark ecstatic prose..different periods of his life blending into a single meditation of breathtaking beauty and profundity on love and loss and death, the final page of which brought tears.

—— The Financial Times

A beautifully written tale of youthful passion

—— Good Housekeeping

A novel about sexual awakening and the tricks that memory plays. Banville's lushly gorgeous prose enhances a mood of brooding passion in a place of secrets

—— The I

A sumptuous novel. Read it for the sentences and smarts, and for the copious sexy parts

—— Richard Ford , Guardian, Books of the Year

Everything I want from a love story: sexy, convincing, baffling, funny, sad and unforgettable

—— Juliet Nicholson , Evening Standard, "Books of the Year"

Banville's exquisitely written novel unravels the deceptions of memory with wit and pathos

—— Telegraph

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