Now Reading: Five Quarters of the Orange

Five Quarters of the Orange
Joanne Harris @ 2001
Perenial - 2002
304 pages

In her bestselling and critically acclaimed novel Chocolat, Joanne Harris told a lush story of the conflicts between pleasures and repression. Now she delivers her most complex and sophisticated work yet, an unforgettable tale of mothers and daughter, of the past and the present, of resisting and succumbing – an extraordinary work of fiction limned with darkness and fierce joy.

When Framboise Simon returns to a small village on the banks of the Loire, the locals do not recognize her as the daughter of the infamous woman they hold responsible for a tragedy during the German occupation years ago. But the past and present are inextricably entwined, particularly in a scrapbook of recipes and memories that Framboise has inherited from her mother. And soon Framboise will relize that the journal also contains the key to the tragedy and indelibly marked that summer of her ninth year…