Paperback. Tan cover with black title and cat image. In the original dust jacket.

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• A FROST PAPERBACK is a loved book which a member of the Frost family has checked for condition, cleanliness, completeness and readability. When the buyer collects their book, the delivery charge of £3.00 is not made.

For conditions, please view our photographs. A nice clean original book from the library gathered by the famous Cambridge Don, computer scientist, food and wine connoisseur, Jack Arnold LANG.

Jack founded the Michelin Guide ‘Midsummer House’- Cambridge’s paramount restaurant. This dining experience is hidden amongst the grassy pastures and grazing cattle of Midsummer Common and perched on the banks of the River Cam.

Gerald Samper, an effete Englishman, lives on a hilltop in Tuscany. He is a ghostwriter for celebrities, and a foodie, whose weird tastes include ‘Mussels in Chocolate and Garlic’ and ‘Fernet Branca Ice Cream’. His idyll is shattered by the arrival of Marta, a vulgar woman from a former Soviet republic now run by gangsters, notably male members of her family. She is a composer in a neo-folk style who claims to be writing a score for a trendy Italian film director. The neighbours’ lives disastrously intertwine. The entourages of the rock star and the director come and go; mysterious black helicopters bring news of mayhem in Voynova, Marta’s homeland; and along the way the English obsession with Tuscany is satirized mercilessly.

Review: Cooking With Fernet Branca was long listed for the 2004 Booker Prize and won the BBC’s “People’s Booker” title. However, Chris Smith, the chair of the panel that year, dismissed it as being “a bit of a one-trick pony”. This seems terribly unfair. The novel is a comic farce, set in Tuscany, where Gerald Samper, a British ghostwriter of sporting ‘auto’biographies has set up a pastiche of the rural idyll. He writes by day and cooks by night – he believes himself to be quite the gastronome and intersperses his narratives with recipes that abound with ludicrously large or ludicrously small quantities of ingredients, many of which are … um… exotic. Gerald is disappointed to find that he has a neighbour, Marta, a Voynovian composer of songs. The humour, chiefly, revolves around the mismatch between the two characters’ self perception and their perception of each other. James Hamilton-Paterson manages to keep this up throughout the novel, with neither character getting stale. The more we get to know them, the more we want to know more. Both Gerald and Marta introduce side-characters who are all, in their own ways, just as grotesque. We have Italian film directors, boy band stars, Eastern European oligarchs, playboys driving sportscars. It’s perfect light holiday reading, but working on a number of levels. It’s really very clever.

If Cooking With Fernet Branca has a weak spot, it is a rather rushed and chaotic ending – yet not one that is terribly closely related to the farcical misunderstandings. It’s more just chaos for its own sake and the novel might have been stronger without it. But this is a minor blemish on an otherwise rather wonderful comic novel. I shall look forward to rejoining Gerald in the sequels in the near future. Right now I feel inspired to go out and buy a bottle of Fernet Branca. If I don’t like drinking it, I could always use it to make ice cream.

James Hamilton-Paterson is the author of the bestselling Empire of the Clouds, which was hailed as a classic account of the golden age of British aviation. He won a Whitbread Prize for his first novel, Gerontius, and among his many other celebrated books are Seven-Tenths, one of the finest books written in recent times about the oceans, the satirical trilogy that began with Cooking with Fernet Branca, and the autobiographical Playing With Water. Born and educated in England, he has lived in the Philippines and Italy and now makes his home in Austria.