Viper Wine - Hermione Eyre [AZW3, EPUB, MOBI] {TheArchivist}seeders: 2
leechers: 0
Viper Wine - Hermione Eyre [AZW3, EPUB, MOBI] {TheArchivist} (Size: 8.04 MB)
Description Viper WineA richly evocative and playful story of beauty, vanity and addiction, set at a time when England was on the cusp between magic and science. (Requested here - 20 Mar 2015 05:49) Metadata ISBN-13: 9781448155965 ASIN: B00GO8HY2E Publisher: Vintage Digital Publication date: 10/16/2012 Goodreads link: Viper Wine Formats: AZW3, EPUB, MOBI Pages: 448 Description At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I are beginning to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first signs that they have been drinking a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. But now she is married and her “mid-climacteric” approaches, all that adoration has curdled to scrutiny, and she fears her powers are waning. Her devoted husband, Sir Kenelm Digby – alchemist, explorer, philosopher, courtier, and time-traveller – believes he has the means to cure wounds from a distance, but he so loves his wife that he will not make her a beauty tonic, convinced she has no need of it. From the whispering court at Whitehall, to the charlatan physicians of Eastcheap, here is a marriage in crisis, and a country on the brink of civil war. The novel takes us backstage at a glittering Inigo Jones court masque, inside a dour Puritan community, and into the Countess of Arundel's snail closet. We see a lost Rubens altarpiece and peer into Venetia’s black-wet obsidian scrying mirror. Based on real events, Viper Wine is 1632 rendered in Pop Art prose; a place to find alchemy, David Bowie, recipes for seventeenth-century beauty potions, a Borgesian unfinished library and a submarine that sails beneath the Thames.  Meet the Authors Hermione Eyre Hermione Eyre is a journalist and former croupier. She read English at Hertford College, Oxford and became TV Critic of the Independent on Sunday at age 27. She went on to be chief interviewer at the London Evening Standard Magazine, and contributes to publications including The The Times, ELLE magazine, Prospect and the FT. Her interviewees have included Naomi Campbell, Juliette Binoche and Carey Mulligan. This is her first novel.   Sharing Widget |