Rancid Pansies - Softcover

?Imagine a British John Waters crossed with David Sedaris.? ?"The New York Times Book Review" ?["Cooking with Fernet Branca"] is one of the best books I?ve read for a long time.? ?"The Wall Street Journal" ?Provokes the sort of indecorous involuntary laughter that has more in common with sneezing than chuckling.? ?"The New York Times" ?Hamilton-Paterson quickly seduces the reader with perfectly captured tone and timing.? ?"The New Yorker" ?Hamilton-Paterson, one of our finest prose stylists, is a national treasure; and Amazing Disgrace is a gorgeous plum pudding of a novel.? ?"The Spectator" ?There is so much pleasure to be had along the way from Hamilton-Paterson's delight in language and wicked way with unreliable narrators.? ?"Times Literary Supplement"

The hero of this black farce of a book is Gerald Samper, a ghostwriter to unbearable sports celebrities and rock stars, whose dream is to write the libretto of an opera. After an unsuccessful sojourn in Suffolk that ends in the accidental death of an ancient aristocrat, Gerry returns to Tuscany to the site of his collapsed house, now a place of pilgrimage after the strange apparition of a deceased English princess with great legs. A sinister estate agent smells a chance to make serious money, and Gerry is persuaded to go along with the scam in return for certain favours. Meanwhile, Gerry is motivated to collaborate on an opera about the life of Princess Diana, the not-quite-saint who has inspired such strange devotion. The premiere will be the high point of his life, though not quite in the way he imagines . . .