The Lovers Cookbook

This is not a cookbook so don’t expect multiple shots of Nigella looking all doe-eyed and comely in a dressing gown with a few recipes thrown in or Delia telling you how to boil water. The Lovers Cookbook is a novel about food and love (the clue’s in the title) Characters in the book show some of the same attitudes to love as they do to food, craving it, avoiding it or using it to get their own way. The novel is set in a Home Counties village with all its petty snobberies and subtle class distinctions, (if you’ve ever lived in one you’ll know what I mean)where intrigue, deception and adultery lurk beneath the apparently respectable surface. The Lovers Cookbook, compiled for fund raising purposes, proves to be a controversial project and throws into sharp focus divisions in the village. The social order is slowly overturned and the veneer of respectability is stripped away, revealing uncomfortable truths and changing lives forever