Kitchen Venom

"[An] elegant novel of poisoned love and intimate violence . . . Sharp and funny . . . a beautifully polished performance." --James Lakeman, The Times Literary Supplement

"Political intrigue, sexual chicanery, disappointment, betrayal" combine with "dazzling" effect (Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph) in this scandalous novel that exposed the secrets of Margaret Thatcher's government.

As a senior clerk in the House of Commons, John is a man of gravitas, a well-respected widower with two grown-up daughters, who upholds establishmentarian codes of morality and decency. What his colleagues don't know is that he harbors a secret predilection for rent boys. Afternoon assignations in his current squeeze's discreet Earl's Court flat are one thing, but when his reputation, his job, and his relationship with his friends and family are all threatened, John takes desperate measures to protect himself. Set during the last days of Margaret Thatcher's premiership, and ingeniously narrated by an all-knowing incarnation of the Prime Minister herself, Kitchen Venom is a lethally entertaining story of sex, secrets, and scandal.

A sensation when it was published in the UK in 1996, Kitchen Venom cost Philip Hensher his own job as a clerk in the British House of Commons--an achievement "all the more remarkable," the Independent noted, given the vehicle of this ruination was "a stunningly intelligent, assured and compelling novel."

Philip Hensher was born in 1965 in London, where he still lives. He worked as a House of Commons Clerk between 1990 and 1996. His novels include The Mulberry Empire, The Northern Clemency, Scenes from Early Life and To Battersea Park. He has won or been shortlisted for the Somerset Maugham Award, the Ondaatje Prize and the Man Booker Prize, among others. In 2026 his A History of the Novel in Britain will be published by Penguin.