The Feasting Season Book

Meg Parker, an American travel-book writer, lives in the Lorraine countryside with her two small children and a neglectful husband. Domestic life is beginning to take its toll until Meg is offered her dream assignment: to write a guidebook about French history. Unfortunately, there is a catch. Jean-Jacques, a scruffy and imperious photographer, has been assigned to the project. As the dueling pair visits each region in search of the past, what they find is the colorful, food-filled present—the festive bullfights in the Camargue, the sacred gypsy pilgrimage at Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the pictographs and lightning storms of Mount Bégo. And over the course of mouthwatering meals—of lamb daube, paella and rosé, bull steak and anchioade, Brebis and strawberries—their antagonistic collaboration turns into a fiery love affair.

Meg's notions about history—about what we preserve and how we accept the new—evolve, and in the end, she must reconcile her two lives and decide what to hold on to, and what to let go.

Publishers Weekly

This debut novel, a travelogue/love story by the author of a number of European travel books, has much to offer in its description of food, wine and history, but little to say about amour. American-born travel writer Meg Parker lives with her husband and two children in a centuries-old farmhouse in the Lorraine region of France. With her fruit cellar as her home office, Meg is working on another guidebook and a French text when she receives an offer to write a book on French history. Her goofy British husband, Nigel, seems happiest drinking with his friends, her children are needy, and after little deliberation, Meg accepts the offer. Her relationship with the book's photographer, Jean-Jacques Chabrol (J-J to his amis), is stormy from their first e-mail exchange. The conflict between the two (he, a typically passionate Frenchman, she, the typical overeducated American living abroad) is as predictable as their explosive love affair. Their steamy, France-hopping days and nights are punctuated by Meg's visits home and her stabs at deciding whom she wants more: Nigel or J-J. Coons's lush novel is most seductive when dealing with French gastronomical history, but the love story never removes itself from the boilerplate. (July)