A press release from Jonathan Cape:
Dan Franklin, Publisher at Jonathan Cape, is delighted to have acquired UK and Commonwealth rights to Viper Wine, the debut novel by Hermione Eyre. Rights were bought from Charlie Campbell at Ed Victor Ltd.
Viper Wine is a novel based on the lives of the celebrated Stuart courtiers Venetia Stanley (d. 1633) and Sir Kenelm Digby (d. 1665). At Whitehall Palace in 1632, the ladies at the court of Charles I begin to look suspiciously alike. Plump cheeks, dilated pupils, and a heightened sense of pleasure are the first symptoms of a potent new beauty tonic, Viper Wine, distilled and discreetly dispensed by the physician Lancelot Choice. Venetia Stanley secretly takes the tonic, and as she grows older she looks ever more youthful, seemingly cheating nature. Thus ViperWine is the story of How a Lady of Quality Preserv’d her Beauty, but Lost her Selfe, set against the backdrop of England descending into Civil War.
Characters in the novel include Anthony Van Dyck, Ben Jonson and Inigo Jones. Sir Kenelm Digby, Venetia’s devoted husband, is a Renaissance over-achiever who bears the inherited guilt of his father’s participation in the Gunpowder Plot. Sir Kenelm is skilled in alchemy, meditation, poetry, piracy and cooking, and yet he struggles to save his wife from her addiction to Viper Wine.
Dan Franklin said: “Viper Wine is a delight: every sentence is a gem, its portrait of a marriage is totally convincing, but what I fell in love with was its playfulness, its wit. I think Hermione Eyre is a novelist with an exciting future ahead of her.”
Hermione Eyre is a journalist whose interviews have appeared in The Times, The Independent and The London Evening Standard Magazine, where she is a Contributing Editor. She was TV critic of the Independent on Sunday for two years. She co-authored with William Donaldson (also known as Henry Root) The Dictionary of National Celebrity, shortly before Donaldson’s death in 2005. She was inspired to write Viper Wine after visiting an exhibition of Van Dyck portraits.