Five Quarters of the Orange

Five Quarters of the Orange is a novel by the English writer Joanne Harris, first published in 2001 and set in France, in the village of Les Laveuses on the river Loire.

The book runs on two timelines. In the first, Framboise Dartigen is nine years old during the German occupation and lives with her widowed mother and her brother and sister; her mother is subject to rages and blinding headaches, and the children have worked out their own ways of staying out of her way. Framboise spends that summer on the river with a young German soldier, and the friendship she keeps from her family becomes part of a tragedy that the village has never forgiven. In the second timeline, the same woman returns decades later as Framboise Simon, a widow who cooks her mother's recipes in a village restaurant and takes care not to be recognised. Her mother's notebook is both a cookbook and a diary, and the entries in it gradually disclose what the child could not have understood at the time. Harris gives food a central place in the book, as she does in Chocolat and Blackberry Wine: recipes are how Framboise's mother expresses love, and they are also how other people in the village trade, bribe and take revenge. The novel was published by Doubleday, and an audiobook edition is narrated by the author.