Playing Sardines

Half-English and half-French, Michèle Roberts was born in 1949. DAUGHTERS OF THE HOUSE (1992) was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the W.H. Smith Literary Award.

Michele Robert s' collection of short stories, which starts with the titular Playing Sardines is a wickedly gorgeous concoction of the sweet, bittersweet and downright sickly. Roberts has created each female narrator or heroine with as much care as any cook measuring out the ingredients for a rich chocolate mousse, and though not all the stories take food as their main theme, they leave the reader just as sated. Not surprisingly, France--its countryside, its cooking, Paris--takes a lead role in the stories, whether eating cordon bleu food from the perspective of a naive young English bride or roaming the streets of Paris seen through the older eyes of a 60-year-old. Stories which do dwell less on food, such as "Blathering Frights" and "A Bodice Rips" blackly and yet gently mock Robert s' own profession; creative writing courses and romantic novels are turned inside out with little twists of plot and extended metaphors.