Product Description

Playing Sardines - a game in the dark, a game about desire, about wanting, all whipped up in a tale about the erotic allure of recipes: a cook whose obsessive love turns hungry and dangerous; a fan who tries to get into a celebrity novelist's sheets; a fanatical dieter and maker of lists working out how to deal with a husband who snores; a faddy eater thrown off-course by a miracle; a child greedy for love who faces up to her demon of jealousy - just some of the characters who shape this wonderful collection. Women yearning for what they haven't got - prepared to be wily, deceptive, cunning and perverse - all these strategies for survival in love and life are deployed here to mouth-watering effect.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #65214 in Books
• Published on: 2002-04-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 288 pages

Amazon.co.uk Review
Michele Roberts' collection of short stories, which starts with the titular Playing Sardines is a wickedly gorgeous concoction of the sweet, bittersweet and downright sickly. Roberts has created each female narrator or heroine with as much care as any cook measuring out the ingredients for a rich chocolate mousse, and though not all the stories take food as their main theme, they leave the reader just as sated. Not surprisingly, France--its countryside, its cooking, Paris--takes a lead role in the stories, whether eating cordon bleu food from the perspective of a naive young English bride or roaming the streets of Paris seen through the older eyes of a 60-year-old. Stories which do dwell less on food, such as "Blathering Frights" and "A Bodice Rips" blackly and yet gently mock Roberts' own profession; creative writing courses and romantic novels are turned inside out with little twists of plot and extended metaphors.

Michele Roberts has a light touch that makes these stories very readable, and her subtly insinuating tone makes the mockery and morbidity all the more horrific after each story has finished. Playing Sardines is a literary dish to be appreciated in small but perfect portions. --Olivia Dickinson

Review
'Michele Roberts' collection of short stories, which starts with the titular Playing Sardines is a wickedly gorgeous concoction of the sweet, bittersweet and downright sickly. Roberts has created each female narrator or heroine with as much care as any cook measuring out the ingredients for a rich chocolate mousse, and though not all the stories take food as their main theme, they leave the reader just as sated. Not surprisingly, France--its countryside, its cooking, Paris--takes a lead role in the stories, whether eating cordon bleu food from the perspective of a naive young English bride or roaming the streets of Paris seen through the older eyes of a 60-year-old. Stories which do dwell less on food, such as "Blathering Frights" and "A Bodice Rips" blackly and yet gently mock Roberts' own profession; creative writing courses and romantic novels are turned inside out with little twists of plot and extended metaphors. Michele Roberts has a light touch that makes these stories very readable, and her subtly insinuating tone makes the mockery and morbidity all the more horrific after each story has finished. Playing Sardines is a literary dish to be appreciated in small but perfect portions. -Olivia Dickinson, Amazon.co.uk Review 'Written in a prose as sharp as a Sabatier knife.' - Guardian

The Times
‘Authors who master the art of the short story are few ... Michèle Roberts certainly has a rare gift for this style of narration’

Customer Reviews

Wonderful!
What an excellent book this is! The short story format is very suitable for a last-minute-at-night-before-lights-out read. I found that in the evening I would read a story and took it as a story, but the following day I kept thinking of all the sub-plots, the double meanings etc.
It is so deep, so colourful, so full of life that I cannot but love this book. It has a couple of lesbian stories too, for the lesbians among us. Five stars, no doubt!