Five Quarters Of The Orange (Paragon Softcover Large Print Books)

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The scent convinces her mother that she is about to have one of her spells, she takes morphine tablets, and takes to her bed, The characters are not easily liked, very few are amiable, and the entire is both dramatically and emotionally tense. And that tension is for its entire length and continued within personality and character far beyond the ending. Because our narrator and others are never easy people. I was nine years old in 1942. Father had died in the war and Maman was unpredictable. "I can smell oranges," she would say and rage furiously as she disappeared to her room with a migraine. Cassis, Reine and I would then go to Angers, where we exchanged information with the Germans for sweets. Harris has a gift for injecting magic into the everyday ... She is an old-fashioned writer in the finest sense, believing in a strong narrative, fully rounded characters, a complex plot, even a moral Daily Telegraph

In a strange contradiction of her own nature, the mother is also a superb cook: the delicious meals she prepares would make a voluptuary blush -- an irony, and an enigma. How does one gather such fruits, (quite literally) when the rest of Europe is starving? This rang something of a false note -- but perhaps the juxtaposition suggests that out of rotten fruit can spring the most wondrous delicacies? Still ... Harris indulges her love of rich and mouthwatering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses... Thoroughly enjoyable' -- Observer Five quarters. It’s a subtle reference to the children’s logic and rationale: they’ll only tell the Nazis about people in Anger, they’ll only tell them about people they don’t know. After all nothing bad will happen to them – they’ll just have their contraband taken away - a redistribution of wealth, it’s only fair right? Cassis believes they are merely doing what Robin Hood would do. Very thought provoking. I read the book in two days and am still thinking about it a few days down the line' -- ***** Reader review

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I loved Tomas Leibniz. He never used the information we gave him and we all just had a lot of fun. One night he told us to meet him outside La Mauvaise Reputation, but things went wrong. Reine-Claude was raped and old Gustave was killed. We saw less of Tomas after that. Now we near the end. I was fishing for pike when Tomas pulled up. "Help me," I cried. He jumped in and drowned. Cassis pulled him out. "What shall we do?" he whimpered pathetically. "Shoot him with his pistol to make it look like the Resistance was involved."

I did expect a somewhat more complex ending, especially given the originality and strength of the majority of the book. I asked myself ... can it really be that simple? ... Can it really be that banal? And then I started to wonder if the beauty wasn't in the simplicity after all. 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. Beyond the war and small town France location coupled with the scrumptious cooking and foodie directions, the real core of the story is the tightly coiled personalities of the youngest daughter and the Mother. A type of personality with intense likes and dislikes and invincible quantities of what we would, in my old neighborhood, call "moxie". Framboise, Cassis and Reine's mother. A complicated woman, more at home in the garden or the kitchen than the nursery. She has had to be strong to survive, but her children do not understand how much she genuinely cares for them. She believes in treating children like fruit trees - they benefit from harsh pruning - and so gives them no sign of affection. Instead she expresses her love through cooking - although the children do not understand this. Mirabelle is generally not liked in the village, partly because she does not attend church and partly because for a woman running a farm alone was thought at that time to be slightly indecent. She suffers from terrible headaches, often heralded by the phantom scent of oranges, which cause her to be out of action for days at a time. She keeps a diary among her recipes, written in a secret code.Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives. From the bestselling author of Chocolat, a powerful drama about the dark repercussions of Nazi occupation in a rural French village.