Customer Rating: 
Summary: Wicked, witty, wacky
Comment: I've bought this book on sale at the local library partly because it was ridiculously cheap and partly because of the hilarious narrative inside the cover of the book that made reference to 'Alien Pie' for which among many other things '1 kg smoked cat, off the bone' and '1 single drop household paraffin' were required . So, naturally I HAD to have it. I began reading on the bus and suddenly found myself missing all my stops, when I did finally arrive I could hardly wait to get home to continue with the reading and finished the book that same evening. Since then I've been re-reading the favourite bits and have developed an addiction to Fernet Branca....so I've become a much happier person as a result of this book, LOL
Customer Rating:
Summary: At last...
Comment: What a treat to read a book where the story line is driven by highly developed characters. This surely is one sign of a skilled writer. It's a bit like watching a play with no props where only the skill of the actors keeps the audience spellbound. In an era of special effects and melodrama, this is a simple story well told.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: this is NOT a cookery book!
Comment: My fault - I DID read the blurb and understood that this book was going to be a humourous book but I(wrongly)assumed that somewhere in this book there would still be real recipes and real information about living in Tuscany/Italy.
Because of this I was quite dissapointed as it could have been set anywhere in Europe, just a few token descriptions of the views and although I read it to the end, I couldn't warm to any of the characters; the 'plot' just seemed a bit silly and unbelievable and I found the whole thing a bit 'thin'
Customer Rating:
Summary: Unrepresentative tripe
Comment: This was so awful and hackneyed, I couldn't finish it. With all the cosmopolitan sophistication of Jeremy Clarkson expressed in the tone of Bertie Wooster, it will appeal to fans of 'Allo,'Allo and other unreconstructed Brits who think there's something fundamentally wrong with/funny about all foreigners.
I'm delighted to say, however, that it appears to be utterly unrepresentative of JH-P's output. Solely on the basis of Seven-Tenths, especially 'Sea Burial', it is clear that the author is a writer of very high quality. The work is by turns erudite, imaginative, arcane, beautiful, unexpected, weird, full of interesting and thought-provoking insights and is clearly the work of an original and iconoclastic thinker with a gift for evoking subtle, haunting atmospheres. His prose is never less than taut and elegant, and verges on the poetic with his exquisite descriptive style and imagery.
Hard to imagine anything more different from Fernet-Branca. Hamilton-Paterson should be much more widely known, but not for this one.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Typically English
Comment: The essences of British humour are what could crudely be described as 'foreigners and bodily functions'. Provided that you are comfy with the idea that foreigners are funny, and that indigestion is funny, then you'll enjoy this book enormously. To my eternal shame, I find both funny. This book is nicely written - JHP is a capable writer - and concentrates on the one-trick joke of bizarre foodstuffs and pretentious cooks. (The pretentious cooks thing has rather been done to death, but JHP's satire on 'Michelin starred' recipes is very well realised.)
Fernet Branca, BTW, is the most disgusting substance that I've ever put in my mouth. (I thought it was a made-up joke, until I saw a bottle in a bar a couple of years ago.) It is somewhere between dark blue and brown in colour, it is a limpid, treacly hand-grenade of a beverage with a taste, texture and appearance something like Duckhams 20-50 motor oil. IMHO.
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