The wife of a barbaric crime boss engages in a secretive romance with a gentle bookseller between meals at her husband's restaurant. Food, colour coding, sex, murder, torture and cannibalism are the exotic fare in this beautifully filmed but brutally uncompromising modern fable which has been interpreted as an allegory for Thatcherism. This book is the complete script of the film The Cook, The Thief, His Wife and Her Lover in which we discover that the filmmaker is not only a great creator of cinematographic splendours but also an authentic writer who seeks literary imagery and metaphor. This title is part of the Dis Voir, Scripts by Peter Greenaway Series.