Five Quarters of the Orange

Her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as Chocolat was smooth INDEPENDENT A GRIPPING PAGE-TURNER SET IN OCCUPIED FRANCE, FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF CHOCOLAT AND THE STRAWBERRY THIEF Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake - but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface. This is where Framboise, a secretive widow, plies her culinary trade at the creperie - and lets her memory play strange games. As her nephew attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes Framboise has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers, memories of a disturbed childhood during the German Occupation flood back, and expose a past full of betrayal, blackmail and lies. Just as she did in Chocolat, Harris indulges her love of rich and mouth-watering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses with seductively foreign names, and evoking the textures and smells of food. These descriptions are suffused with a child s wide-eyed wonder that lends the story a magical quality, almost like a folk tale... Thoroughly enjoyable GUARDIAN