Five Quarters of the Orange - Joanne Harris

Beyond the main street of Les Laveuses runs the Loire, smooth and brown as a sunning snake - but hiding a deadly undertow beneath its moving surface.

This is where Framboise, a secretive widow named after a raspberry liqueur, plies her culinary trade at the crêperie and lets her memory play strange games. Into this world comes the threat of revelation as Framboise's nephew a profiteering Parisian attempts to exploit the growing success of the country recipes she has inherited from her mother, a woman remembered with contempt by the villagers of Les Laveuses.

As the spilt blood of a tragic wartime childhood flows again, exposure beckons for Framboise, the widow with an invented past.