Joanne Harris' sensational novel Five Quarters of the Orange revolves around a recipe book, continuing the theme of culinary intrigue begun in Chocolat and Blackberry Wine. Framboise, the middle-aged narrator, begins her story in Les Laveuses, on the banks of the Loire:

When my mother died she left the farm to my brother, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-litre jar containing a single black Perigord truffle.

Framboise returns to the village where she grew up during wartime, and with the help of the recipes scribbled in her mother's album, opens up a small restaurant. However, she is desperate to keep her identity a secret even amongst the aged villagers with whom she played on the banks of the Loire in the years of German occupation during the Second World War. Framboise immerses herself once again in the peaceful rhythms of village life, pungently evoked by Harris's evocative prose. But slowly, reluctantly, Framboise begins to unravel the terrible wartime secret that drove her family away from the village. As she cuts between idyllic descriptions of the village and the increasingly dark memories of the war, Framboise admits:

I know, I know. You want me to get to the point. But this is at least as important as the rest, the method of telling, and the time taken to tell. It has taken me fifty-five to begin, at least let me do it in my own way.

This could be a description of Harris's prose itself, as it slowly and deliberately cuts between Framboise's fragile present and her happy childhood, destroyed by the tragic innocence of youth. Although Five Quarters of the Orange finds Harris on familiar ground to Chocolat, this is a much darker and compelling novel of childhood nostalgia and betrayal, and the need to confront the tragedies of the past before they destroy the possibilities of a happier future. --Jerry Brotton

'Vastly enjoyable, utterly gripping'

'Harris is an acute observer of the lush French countryside?A luscious feast of a book'

'Outstanding?beautifully written'

'Her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as CHOCOLAT was smooth'

The magical new novel from the author of the Number One bestselling and Whitbread-shortlisted CHOCOLAT

The magical new novel from the author of the Number One be 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 named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the creperie - and lets memory play strange games. Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew - a profiteering Parisian - attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses. As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past. Joanne Harris has looked behind the drawn shutters of occupied France to illuminate the pain, delight and loss of a life changed for ever by the uncertainties and betrayals of war.

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 named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the cr?perie - and lets her memory play strange games.

Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew - a profiteering Parisian - attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses. As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past.

Joanne Harris
Joanne Harris is the author of the international bestsellers CHOCOLAT (also a major film starring Juliette Binoche, Judi Dench, Alfred Molina, Lena Olin and Johnny Depp), BLACKBERRY WINE, FIVE QUARTERS OF THE ORANGE, COASTLINERS, and, with Fran Warde, THE FRENCH KITCHEN: A COOKBOOK. She lives in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, with her husband and daughter.

WHEN MY MOTHER DIED SHE LEFT THE FARM TO MY BROTHER, Cassis, the fortune in the wine cellar to my sister, Reine-Claude, and to me, the youngest, her album and a two-litre jar containing a single black Pirigord truffle, large as a tennis ball and suspended in sunflower oil, which, when uncorked, still releases the rich dank perfume of the forest floor. A fairly unequal distribution of riches, but then Mother was a force of nature, bestowing her favours as she pleased, leaving no insight as to the workings of her peculiar logic.

And as Cassis always said, I was the favourite. Not that she ever showed it when she was alive. For my mother there was never much time for indulgence, even if she'd been the type. Not with her husband killed in the war, and the farm to run alone. Far from being a comfort to her widowhood, we were a hindrance to her, with our noisy games, our fights, our quarrels. If we fell ill, she would care for us with reluctant tenderness, as if calculating the cost of our survival, and what love she showed took the most 1 1 elementary forms: cooking pots to lick, jam pans to scrape, a handful of wild strawberries collected from the straggling border behind the vegetable patch, and delivered without a smile in a twist of handkerchief. Cassis would be the man of the family. She showed even less softness towards him than to the rest of us. Reinette was already turning heads before she reached her teens, and my mother was vain enough to feel pride at the attention she received. But I was the extra mouth, no second son to expand the farm and certainly no beauty. .

I was always the troublesome one, the discordant one, and after my father died I became sullen and defiant. Skinny and dark, like my mother, with her long, graceless hands, flat feet and wide mouth, I must have reminded her too much of herself, for there was often a tightness at her mouth when she looked at me, a kind of stoic appraisal, of fatalism. As if she foresaw that it was I, not Cassis or Reine-Claude, who would carry her memory forward. As if she would have preferred a more fitting vessel. Perhaps that was why she gave me the album, valueless, then, except for the thoughts and insights jotted in the margins alongside recipes and newspaper cuttings and herbal cures. Not a diary, precisely; there are no dates in the album, no precise order. Pages were inserted into it at random, loose leaves later bound together with small, obsessive stitches, some pages thin as onion skin, others cut from pieces of card trimmed to fit inside the battered leather cover. My mother marked the events of her life with recipes, dishes of her own invention or interpretations of 1 2 old favourites. Food was her nostalgia, her celebration, its nurture and preparation the sole outlet for her creativity. The first page is given to my father's death - the ribbon of his Ligion d'Honneur pasted thickly to the paper beneath a blurry photograph and a neat recipe for black-wheat pancakes - and carries a kind of gruesome humour. Under the picture my mother has pencilled, 'Remember - dig up Jerusalem artichokes. Ha! Ha! Ha!' in red. .

In other places she is more garrulous, but with many abbreviations and cryptic references. I recognize some of the incidents to which she refers. Others are twisted to suit the moment's needs. Others seem to be complete inventions, lies, impossibilities. In many places there are blocks of tiny script in a language I cannot understand - 'Ini tnawini inoti plainexini. Ini canini inton inraebi inti ynani eromni.' Some-times a single word, scrawled across the top or side of the page, seemingly at random. On one page, 'seesaw' in blue ink, on another, 'wintergreen, rapscallion, ornament' in orange crayon. On another, what might be a poem, though I never saw her open any book other than one of recipes. It reads: .

this sweetness
scooped
like some bright fruit
plum peach apricot
watermelon perhaps
from myself
this sweetness
.

It is a whimsical touch which surprises and troubles me. That this stony and prosaic woman should in her secret moments harbour such thoughts. For she was sealed off from us - from everyone - with such fierceness that I had thought her incapable of yielding. .

I never saw her cry. She rarely smiled, and then only in the kitchen with her palette of flavours at her fingertips, talking to herself - so I thought - in the same toneless mutter, enunciating the names of herbs and spices - 'cinnamon, thyme, peppermint, coriander, saffron, basil, lovage' - running a monotonous commentary. 'See the tile. Has to be the right heat. Too low, the pancake is soggy. Too high, the butter fries black, smokes, the pancake crisps.' I understood later that she was trying to educate me. I listened because I saw in our kitchen seminars the one way in which I might win a little of her approval, and because every good war needs the occasional amnesty. Country recipes from her native Brittany were her favourites; the buckwheat pancakes we ate with everything, the far breton and kouign amann and galette bretonne, which we sold in down-river Angers, with our goat's cheeses, sausage and fruit. .

2008-07-30 Engrossing

Another engrossing read from Joanne Harris which although similar to `Chocolat `and `Blackberry Wine' it is a much darker story. Once again set in France this time a small village `Les Laveuses' near Angers on the banks of the Loire, during WWII and the present day.
The protagonist is Framboise Dartigen who has returned to the village after a long absence to live in the farmhouse of her childhood. Her mother Mirabelle Dartigen has since died and part of Framboise's inheritance was an album of memories and recipes. It is through studying this album that her memories of her childhood start to haunt her. Framboise has invented a new identity for herself, as she knows the villagers would look on her with contempt if they knew whose daughter she was. She uses her mother's recipes from the album in her restaurant which helps to make it the success it is. The consequent interference of her jealous and scheming nephew and his wife threaten to expose her true identity. However there is already one village friend from her childhood who guessed immediately who she really was and it with his help that she prevents this happening and unravels the mysteries that drove her family to leave the village during the Second World War. Putting the tragedies of the past behind her Framboise is finally able to look forward to a happy future, now she is no longer resisting the truths discovered in her mother's album.
As with all Joanne Harris's novels that I have read I highly recommend this one.