Brace yourself for this lively, amusing and alarmingly informative novel

A greasy, hilarious tale of loyalty, revenge and dark appetites

Confirms all your worst fears about professional kitchens in a debut novel that is dark, pungent, twisted, surprising and above all genuinely funny. If you enjoy eating out, don't read this book

Raucous and inventive, peopled with technicolour characters and savagely funny, Chop Chop announces Simon Wroe as both an heir to Martin Amis and an oven-fresh talent unto himself

A complete page-turner. Reminiscent of Kitchen Confidential but with an entirely fresh voice that is a pleasure to read

Perfectly baked [with] a rich, gooey pool of dark comedy hiding beneath the surface. Despite straying into the realm of sabotage, blackmail and secret dinner parties serving stomach-churning illegal fare, Wroe's novel makes for fresh, appetising reading

A brutally funny look at the world of professional cooking. Sometimes the truth is so strange it needs to be sautéed in a pan of fiction

Furiously funny, fast, surreal. The heat and the profanity feel painfully real; the prose, masterfully stylized, definitely the stuff of fiction

Arch comedy ... Dave Eggers channels Anthony Bourdain

Depicts the literal underworld of a restaurant kitchen with wit, vigor, and gleeful, necessary profanity

Eyre has written a sumptuous, sensual tale of beauty and vanity; it's crying out for a TV adaptation.

Magical realism meets a seventeenth-century Portrait of a Marriage. To say it is dazzling would be a puritan understatement.

Persistently bizarre, fecund, technically inventive, funny – and oddly touching.

Viper Wine richly evokes Elizabethan and Jacobean language and is alert to the plight of Catholics under Elizabeth I and King James, while at the same time putting a post-modernist spin on the tight and enthralling plot. I used to be dubious about alchemy and antiquarianism, but the wit and excitement of this first novel breathes new life into them.

[A] cornucopia of a novel.

As funny as it is surreal.

This funny and exciting novel takes a fresh look at life during the excitement and danger of the 17th century.

The language is beautiful, creating fantastic images with her descriptions.

Eyre’s prose is sensuous and rich… Her recreation of the period is persuasive and alluring.

A pacy, cleverly postmodern historical novel... Viper Wine is a high-flying, high-concept mix that stylishly transmutes its wildly disparate elements into an assured, flamboyant gem.

A mad, psychedelic romp through some of history’s most fertile ground... The author’s voracious enthusiasm for eclectic, highly-researched detail is persistently entertaining, breathing new life into the genre of the historical novel. A real tonic.

Clever, lively and playful... [An] impressive first novel.

A dazzling debut… Wickedly funny.

This dazzling firework of a debut novel is a reminder of how inventive and original historical fiction can be.

Eyre pulls off a notable trick in Viper Wine, not just by reconstructing her chosen period but rendering it permeable to intrusions from other ages… Playful moments…are made all the more striking by being woven unannounced into a meticulously luscious fantasia on a theme of English high life in the 1630s.

The horrors of the beauty industry are taken apart with feline wit and the book will make you purr with pleasure.

The most richly fruited post-modern novel since Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherrys

A bold, impressive debut

As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved herself an author well worth watching out for

Profoundly moving