Five Quarters of the Orange

 After an absence of many years, Framboise Dartigen, now known as the widow Simon, returns to her childhood home in the village of Les Laveuses. She rebuilds the place - which has lain empty and delapidated for many years - and starts up a crêperie. Soon, her fabulous cooking is attracting crowds of customers. Many of her most successful dishes are drawn from her mother Mirabelle's album, a cornucopia of recipes mixed in with a whole load of dark, disturbing hints and ravings, written in tiny, forced handwriting, occasionally in code: alluding to things that happened when Framboise and her older brother and sister were children, their father recently killed at the front and Les Laveuses occupied by the Germans.

Framboise is concerned, above all, to protect her real identity: if it was to be revealed it wouldn't only threaten her business, but her already-strained relationship with her daughters: gentle Pistache and tough Noisette. And everything goes according to plan, until her brother's son Yannick and his grasping wife Laure - restauranteur and writer - start sniffing round, after Framboise's recipes, Mirabelle's album and the truth about what really happened all those years ago. And they're willing to play dirty.

As bitter as Chocolat was sweet, Five Quarters of the Orange is a tale of food and fishing, crêpes and collaboration, love and the Loire that dives into the murky waters of guilt and memory to ask when and how we can confront past misdeeds, forgive each other, and - most of all - ourselves.