The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99) (From The Northern Echo)

The Good Plain Cook by Bethan Roberts (Serpent’s Tail, £7.99)

10:50am Tuesday 30th June 2009 in

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A WONDERFUL glimpse into sex, class and cooking in the 1930s. A rich and Bohemian American – much given to naked sunbathing – lives with her lover, a would-be poet, in a cottage in the English countryside and employs a shy and inexperienced local teenager as a cook. The resulting confusions – complicated further by the presence of the lovers’ two precocious children and a strong, silent gardener – is a delicious microcosm of the class war, subtly and wittily done, so that we are smiling until we realise the darkness of it all.