Image 1 of 1
In the middle of a great city sits an enormous palace: a warren of chambers and offices, of corridors and pinnacles and gargoyled terraces. An ornate door may unlock to an ornate rooftop, or to a room of bored, learned men; to a vast ballroom piled high with boxes and wrecked furniture, or to an intimate chamber where a woman in the last days of her power commands the attention of a rapt, angry government with her words, her voice, her unforgettable clothes. It is the end of the twentieth century, and this is the British Parliament with its lonely, lady Prime Minister.
She knows all, sees all: the professional lives of her colleagues, smooth, efficient, and absurd; the distinguished and scrupulous Clerk, his afternoons with his rent-boy lover, his daughters living in despair; the nights of dissipation and excess; the hushed acts of violence and queer doings after nightfall. Soon it will all be over, like a magic trick.
Kitchen Venom is an excoriating tragedy of manners, a novel of betrayal and excess that stands among the most vivid, original, and immaculately rendered portraits of the human faces behind faceless governance. Philip Hensher, who was himself a House of Commons Clerk, was summarily sacked when the novel was published in 1996, as he details in the new preface to this first US edition.
“[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
