SOURCE: Duncker, Patricia. “Cookery Lessons.” New Statesman 14, no. 661 (18 June 2001): 58.

In the following review, Duncker observes that the motif of cooking and eating unites the stories in Playing Sardines.

Food, Sex and God was the title of Michèle Roberts's earlier book of essays, and signalled her central preoccupations as a writer. Food, sex and God are indeed the main themes of her arresting new collection of stories, Playing Sardines. Her approach to each is adventurous, quirky and erotic. Both food and sex, in the orthodox forms of communion and marriage, are sacraments in the Catholic Church. I read Roberts as a Catholic writer, still wrestling with the language and symbols of her religion. Her passionate commitment to women, our sexuality and freedom, compromises and complicates her relation to Catholicism.

In one of her most remarkable novels, Impossible Saints, Roberts works through these contradictions and constraints in the fantastical...