Headless Yard

Hermione Eyre is a writer and journalist whose first novel, Viper Wine, was published by Jonathan Cape in 2014 and shortlisted for the Walter Scott Prize. As a journalist, her interviewees include actors Carey Mulligan, Juliette Binoche and Robert Pattinson, and artists Howard Hodgkin, Grayson Perry and Gilbert and George. She once defended Joanna Lumley and Jonathan Miller from a gunman during an interview. For seven years she was a staff writer on the Independent on Sunday. She is now freelance, contributing to publications including The Times, Independent, Financial Times, ELLE, Harper's Bazaar, Christie's Magazine, and the London Evening Standard Magazine, where she is Contributing Editor. In 2005 she co-wrote The Dictionary of National Celebrity with the legendary author William Donaldson.

A group of avant-garde artists romp, hustle, and swindle their way to the top of the 90s London art scene, in this riotously funny new novel for readers of Miranda July and Rachel Kushner 
 
After Kate Endish is accepted into the prestigious Grove School of Art, she finally achieves her dreams: dropping out of university to join a ragtag group of eccentric artists in a ramshackle warehouse in Hackney, changing the world one bricolage at a time. They are Headless Yard, five hot-headed, bold visionaries aiming to drag art back to life, and get filthy rich in the process. 
 
Threatening to thwart them are market forces, artistic rivalry, personal integrity and the passions of love – or rather, their foul-mouthed parrot, the junkies downstairs, the asbestos lining the walls and their jaded art dealer. Secretly, Kate reckons the only one worth their salt is Lubbock – still into figurative painting and stubbornly immune to the lure of money and fame. 
 
As the 90s progress in an art and drug-fuelled haze, the group cover countless magazines, win and lose big, and court outrage and scandal. Yet as the millennium draws to a close and the group begins to splinter, Kate begins to wonder: are any of them even true artists, and what is it all for?

Hermione Eyre

Exuberantly inventive and intelligent... Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original.

An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future.

Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.

Playful, witty and expansive... An exceptionally clever and exhilarating excursion through Caroline high society.

A genre-defying debut novel... Vivid and vivacious – hats off to Eyre.

Bold and wildly original, Viper Wine is an exuberantly witty play on the vanity and ghoulishness of the beauty industry, and a celebration of the unfading beauty of language... Hermione Eyre has injected new youth into the historical novel.

Hermione Eyre’s bold and satisfying debut...offers up a potent mixture of baroque intricacy and gothic horror. Like Laurent Binet’s HHhH… Viper Wine tries to tease out the tensions that exist when telling history as fiction. Eyre’s novel is stylistically a world away from Binet’s, but shows some of the same playfulness in its reworking of historical sources… The stylistic brio and technical invention on show here is truly impressive…

A wickedly funny parable of today's beauty industry... Descriptive brilliance and breathtaking cleverness.

No account of [Van Dyck] has perhaps been so convincing as that in Viper Wine… As art history it’s deeply unorthodox – but as a postmodern portrait of a trend-setting painter in the midst of a comeback, it seems both thrillingly and entertainingly right.

Almost 400 years after Venetia Stanley's death, little has changed. As an allegory of our ageing-obsessed generation, [Viper Wine] is hard to argue with.

Eyre has written a sumptuous, sensual tale of beauty and vanity; it's crying out for a TV adaptation.

Magical realism meets a seventeenth-century Portrait of a Marriage. To say it is dazzling would be a puritan understatement.

Tom Holland, author of 'Rubicon' and 'Persian Fire'

Persistently bizarre, fecund, technically inventive, funny – and oddly touching.

Viper Wine richly evokes Elizabethan and Jacobean language and is alert to the plight of Catholics under Elizabeth I and King James, while at the same time putting a post-modernist spin on the tight and enthralling plot. I used to be dubious about alchemy and antiquarianism, but the wit and excitement of this first novel breathes new life into them.

This funny and exciting novel takes a fresh look at life during the excitement and danger of the 17th century.

The language is beautiful, creating fantastic images with her descriptions.

Eyre’s prose is sensuous and rich… Her recreation of the period is persuasive and alluring.

A pacy, cleverly postmodern historical novel... Viper Wine is a high-flying, high-concept mix that stylishly transmutes its wildly disparate elements into an assured, flamboyant gem.

A mad, psychedelic romp through some of history’s most fertile ground... The author’s voracious enthusiasm for eclectic, highly-researched detail is persistently entertaining, breathing new life into the genre of the historical novel. A real tonic.

Clever, lively and playful... [An] impressive first novel.

This dazzling firework of a debut novel is a reminder of how inventive and original historical fiction can be.

Eyre pulls off a notable trick in Viper Wine, not just by reconstructing her chosen period but rendering it permeable to intrusions from other ages… Playful moments…are made all the more striking by being woven unannounced into a meticulously luscious fantasia on a theme of English high life in the 1630s.

The horrors of the beauty industry are taken apart with feline wit and the book will make you purr with pleasure.

The most richly fruited post-modern novel since Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing the Cherrys

As a debut novel, it is truly dazzling and Hermione Eyre has proved herself an author well worth watching out for

'Wickedly funny' The Times 
 
 Famed beauty Venetia Stanley is so extravagantly dazzling she has inspired Ben Jonson to poetry and Van Dyck to painting, provoking adoration and emulation from the masses. Stampedes follow her arrival in town. 
 
However, as she approaches middle age, the attention turns to scrutiny. Her adoring husband Sir Kenelm Digby - philosopher, alchemist and time-traveller - wishes she would age naturally, but Venetia discovers a potent and addictive elixir of youth, Viper Wine. Set on the eve of the English Civil War, and based on a true story, this brilliant novel asks a very contemporary question: what is the cost of beauty? 
 
 'Dazzling' Observer 
 
 'Intoxicating' Independent on Sunday

Hermione Eyre

Praise for Viper Wine

Exuberantly inventive and intelligent... Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original.

An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future.

Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.

Exuberantly inventive and intelligent... Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original.

An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future.

Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.

Exuberantly inventive and intelligent... Sumptuous, strange and startlingly original.

An intoxicating fantasy in which real-life characters are haunted by the future.

Using an alchemy all of her own, Eyre's postmodern take on the 17th century renders it dazzlingly fresh and contemporary.

Books by Hermione Eyre

Follow penguin

Follow ladybird

Follow puffin

Sign up to the Penguin newsletter