Viper Wine

Exuberantly inventive and intelligent… Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original. * Mail on Sunday *
An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future. – Marcus Field * Independent on Sunday *
Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre’s postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary. – Lucy Scholes * Observer *
Playful, witty and expansive… An exceptionally clever and exhilarating excursion through Caroline high society. – Nick Rennison * Sunday Times *
A genre-defying debut novel… Vivid and vivacious – hats off to Eyre. – Sebastian Shakespeare * Tatler *
Bold and wildly original, Viper Wine is an exuberantly witty play on the vanity and ghoulishness of the beauty industry, and a celebration of the unfading beauty of language… Hermione Eyre has injected new youth into the historical novel. – Frances Wilson * Evening Standard *
Hermione Eyre’s bold and satisfying debut…offers up a potent mixture of baroque intricacy and gothic horror. Like Laurent Binet’s HHhH… Viper Wine tries to tease out the tensions that exist when telling history as fiction. Eyre’s novel is stylistically a world away from Binet’s, but shows some of the same playfulness in its reworking of historical sources… The stylistic brio and technical invention on show here is truly impressive… – John Gallagher * Sunday Telegraph *
A wickedly funny parable of today’s beauty industry… Descriptive brilliance and breathtaking cleverness. – Melissa Katsoulis * The Times *
No account of [Van Dyck] has perhaps been so convincing as that in Viper Wine… As art history it’s deeply unorthodox – but as a postmodern portrait of a trend-setting painter in the midst of a comeback, it seems both thrillingly and entertainingly right. – Marcus Field * Independent on Sunday *
Almost 400 years after Venetia Stanley’s death, little has changed. As an allegory of our ageing-obsessed generation, [Viper Wine] is hard to argue with. – Sam Baker * Harper’s Bazaar *

Hermione Eyre is a writer and journalist. Her first novel, Viper Wine, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2014 and shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize.

As a journalist, her interviewees include actors Carey Mulligan, Juliette Binoche, and Robert Pattinson, and artists Howard Hodgkin, Grayson Perry, and Gilbert & George. She once defended Joanna Lumley and Jonathan Miller from a gunman during an interview.

For seven years, she was a staff writer on the Independent on Sunday. She is now freelance, contributing to publications including The Times, Independent, Financial Times, ELLE, Harper’s Bazaar, Christie’s Magazine, and the London Evening Standard Magazine, where she is Contributing Editor.

In 2005, she co-wrote The Dictionary of National Celebrity with the author William Donaldson.

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