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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.”
“[An] elegant novel of poisoned love and intimate violence . . . Sharp and funny . . . a beautifully polished performance.”
—James Lakeman, The Times Literary Supplement
“[An] assured and intriguing novel . . . Hensher’s prose manages to be both immaculate and suggestive.”
—David Profumo, The Daily Telegraph
“Remarkable . . . a stately, inexorable pavane of yearning and violence.”
—Jane Shilling, The Sunday Telegraph
“[Hensher] is an intensely sophisticated writer, a critic of discernment and exquisite sensibility.”
—John Walsh, The Independent
“Impressively stylish . . . written with a formal elegance, in counterpoint to the chaos of the characters’ motivations.”
—Russell Celyn Jones, The Financial Times
“The writing takes risks and makes risque reading . . . He uses language simply as a net for trawling out of emotional politics the deadly truths.”
—David Hughes, The Mail On Sunday
“Sharp and genuinely quirky.”
—Michael Arditti, The Times
“Stunning … beguilingly complex.”
—Charles Osborne, The Sunday Telegraph
“Set amongst the wigs and gowns of parliamentary officialdom, [Kitchen Venom] exposes the hidden tensions in apparently banal lives. The characterisation is incisive and the dialogue first-class.”
—The Sunday Telegraph
“[Kitchen Venom] has a fierce originality . . . Hensher’s dialogue has a fluent virtuosity.”
—Jason Cowley, The Observer
“His House of Commons is as tightly run as a lunatic asylum, as baffling as Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland . . .[the plot] is at first intriguing then wholly beguiling, twisting tight its threads of power, betrayal, lust and love.”
—Michele Roberts, The Independent On Sunday
“A brilliant, hateful work . . . For what it’s worth (and I did once work as a secretary to Margaret Thatcher) I think nobody has better described the trivial, as well as the grand, mechanisms of her mind.”
—Matthew Parris, The Spectator
“Airy, felicitous, superintendent, Hensher releases his staggered secrets and recognitions in a smart but unpredictable procession of bad behaviours.”
—Jeremy Maule, The Guardian
© Eamonn McCabe
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 history of the novel in Britain, Versions of Ourselves, will be published by Penguin.
Kitchen Venom
ISBN: 9781961341906
McNALLY EDITIONS no. 52 • Spring 2026 • Pub: May 12, 2026
$19 • Paperback with flaps • 5” X 8.5” • 288 pages
Fiction—20th century British / Political Satire / LGBTQ+
Rights: North America, Audio
eBook ISBN: 9781961341913
