Blackberry Wine

‘A lively and original talent’ – Sunday Times ‘Harris is at her best when detailing the sensual pleasures of taste and smell. As chocoholics stand advised to stock up on some of their favourite bars before biting into Chocolat, so boozers everywhere should get a couple of bottles in before opening Blackberry Wine’ – Helen Falconer, Guardian ‘Joanne Harris has the gift of conveying her delight in the sensuous pleasures of food, wine, scent and plants… [Blackberry Wine] has all the appeal of a velvety scented glass of vintage wine’ – Lizzie Buchan, Daily Mail ‘If Joanne Harris didn’t exist, someone would have to invent her, she’s such a welcome antidote to the modern preoccupation with the spare, pared down and non-fattening. Not for her the doubtful merits of an elegant and expensive sparkling water or an undressed rocket salad. In her previous novel, Chocolat, she invoked the scent and the flavour of rich, dark, sweet self-indulgence. In Blackberry Wine she celebrates the sensuous energy that can leap from a bottle after years of fermentation… Harris bombards the senses with the smells and tastes of times past… Harris’s talent lies in her own grasp of the quality she ascribes to wine, “layman’s alchemy, the magic of everyday things.” She is fanciful and grounded at the same time – one moment shrouded in mystery, the next firmly planted in earth. Above all, she has wit’ – -Jenni Murray, Sunday Express *** Jay Mackintosh's memories are revived by the delivery of a bottle of home-brewed wine from a long-vanished friend. Jay, disillusioned by adulthood, escapes to a derelict farmhouse in France. There he faces old demons and the beautiful Marise, a woman who hides a terrible secret.