Five Quarters of the Orange
By Joanne Harris, read by Diana Bishop
Running time 11hrs
Soundings £18.99 plus p&p
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Framboise, a widow who keeps her past to herself, lives in Les Laveuses on the Loire, the village she and her family left in the Second World War. Using the country recipes from her mother's old album, she makes a living by cooking for the créperie: Breton buckwheat pancakes, seductive combinations of goat's cheese and coriander.
Joanne Harris's new novel seems set to produce another soothing milk Chocolat. But no, this time the mixture is dark and bitter - and totally engrossing. Interleaved between recipes in the old album for jam and preserving truffles, her mother's jottings reveal the secrets of a terrible past from which the family had been forced to flee all those years before. It is these wartime events which are tantalisingly drip-fed into the narrative like olive oil into mayonnaise.
The childhood of Framboise and her brother and sister in the German-occupied village was a time of clandestine barter, when valuable commodities like information, sex and chocolate all had their price. Though little more than a child, Framboise was of use to the tall German whom she idolised and who loved fishing as much as she did. As the story becomes more complex, the children are thrust into the arena of adult betrayal and war.
Now, half a century later, the scars from those days threaten to dash the chance of happiness presented to the widow Framboise. Superb.
