Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Joanne Harris is the author of the Whitbread Award-nominated Chocolat (made into an Oscar-nominated film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp) and eleven other bestselling novels. She plays bass guitar in a band first formed when she was sixteen, is currently studying Old Norse and lives with her husband and daughter in Yorkshire, England.

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When beautiful, unmarried Vianne Rocher sweeps into the pinched little French town of Lansquenet on the heels of the carnival and opens a gem of a chocolate shop across the square from the church, she begins to wreak havoc with the town's Lenten vows. Her uncanny ability to perceive her customer's private discontents and alleviate them with just the right confection coaxes the villagers to abandon themselves to temptation and happiness, but enrages Pere Reynaud, the local priest. Certain only a witch could stir such sinful indulgence and devise such clever cures, Reynaud pits himself against Vianne and vows to block the chocolate festival she plans for Easter Sunday, and to run her out of town forever. Witch or not (she'll never tell), Vianne soon sparks a dramatic confrontation between those who prefer the cold comforts of the church and those who revel in their newly discovered taste for pleasure.

Hailed as "an amazement of riches few readers will be able to resist" by The New York Times Book Review, Chocolat is a timeless and enchanting story about temptation, pleasure, and what a complete waste of time it is to deny yourself anything.

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Chocolat

Penguin Books

Chapter One

February 11.
Shrove Tuesday

We came on the wind of the carnival. A warm wind for February,laden with the hot greasy scents of frying pancakes andsausages and powdery-sweet waffles cooked on the hot plateright there by the roadside, with the confetti sleeting down collarsand cuffs and rolling in the gutters like an idiot antidote towinter. There is a febrile excitement in the crowds that line thenarrow main street, necks craning to catch sight of the crêpe-coveredchar with its trailing ribbons and paper rosettes. Anoukwatches, eyes wide, a yellow balloon in one hand and a toytrumpet in the other, from between a shopping basket and a sadbrown dog. We have seen carnivals before, she and I; a processionof two hundred and fifty of the decorated chars in Paris lastMardi Gras, a hundred and eighty in New York, two dozenmarching bands in Vienna, clowns on stilts, the Grosses Têteswith their lolling papier-mâché heads, drum majorettes withbatons spinning and sparkling. But at six the world retains aspecial luster. A wooden cart, hastily decorated with gilt andcrêpe and scenes from fairy tales. A dragon's head on a shield,Rapunzel in a woolen wig, a mermaid with a cellophane tail, agingerbread house all icing and gilded cardboard, a witch in thedoorway, waggling extravagant green fingernails, at a group ofsilent children.... At six it is possible to perceive subtleties thata year later are already out of reach. Behind the papier-mâché,the icing, the plastic, she can still see the real witch, the realmagic. She looks up at me, her eyes, which are the blue-green ofEarth seen from a great height, shining.

    "Are we staying? Are we staying here?" I have to remind herto speak French. "But are we? Are we?" She clings to my sleeve.Her hair is a cotton-candy tangle in the wind.

    I consider. It's as good a place as any. Lansquenet-sous-Tannes,two hundred souls at most, no more than a blip on thefast road between Toulouse and Bordeaux. Blink once, and it'sgone. One main street, a double row of dun-colored half-timberedhouses leaning secretively together, a few laterals runningparallel like the tines of a bent fork. A church, aggressivelywhitewashed, in a square of little shops. Farms scattered acrossthe watchful land. Orchards, vineyards, strips of earth enclosedand regimented according to the strict apartheid of country farming:here apples, there kiwis, melons, endives beneath theirblack plastic shells, vines looking blighted and dead in the thinFebruary sun but awaiting triumphant resurrection by March....Behind that the Tannes, small tributary of the Garonne, fingersits way across the marshy pasture. And the people? They lookmuch like all others we have known; a little pale perhaps in theunaccustomed sunlight, a little drab. Headscarves and berets arethe color of the hair beneath, brown, black, or gray. Faces arelined like last summer's apples, eyes pushed into wrinkled fleshlike marbles into old dough. A few children, flying colors of redand lime green and yellow, seem like a different race. As thechar advances ponderously along the street behind the old tractorthat pulls it, a large woman with a square, unhappy faceclutches a tartan coat about her shoulders and shouts somethingin the half-comprehensible local dialect; on the wagon a squatSanta Claus, out of season among the fairies and sirens and goblins,hurls sweets at the crowd with barely restrained aggression.A small-featured elderly man, wearing a felt hat rather than theround beret more common to the region, picks up the sadbrown dog from between my legs with a look of polite apology.I see his thin graceful fingers moving in the dog's fur; the dogwhines; the master's expression becomes complex with love,concern, guilt. No one looks at us. We might as well be invisible;our clothing marks us as strangers, transients. They are polite, sopolite; no one stares at us. The woman, her long hair tucked intothe collar of her orange goat, a long silk scarf fluttering at herthroat; the child in yellow Wellingtons and sky blue mac. Theircoloring marks them. Their clothes are exotic, their faces---arethey too pale or too dark??their hair marks them other, foreign;indefinably strange, The people of Lansquenet have learned theart of observation without eye contact. I feel their gaze like abreath on the nape of my neck, strangely without hostility butcold nevertheless. We are a curiosity to them, a part of the carnival,a whiff of the outlands. I feel their eyes upon us as I turn tobuy a galette from the vendor. The paper is hot and greasy, thedark wheat pancake crispy at the edges but thick and good inthe center. I break off a piece and give it to Anouk, wipingmelted butter from her chin. The vendor is a plump, baldingman with thick glasses, his face slick with the steam from the hotplate. He winks at her. With the other eye he takes in every detail,knowing there will be questions later.

    "On holiday, madame?" Village etiquette allows him to ask;behind his tradesman's indifference I see a real hunger. Knowledgeis currency here; with Agen and Montauban so close,tourists are a rarity.

    "For a while."

    "From Paris, then?" It must be our clothes. In this garish landthe people are drab. Color is a luxury; it wears badly. The brightblossoms of the roadside are weeds, invasive, useless.

    "No, no, not Paris."

    The char is almost at the end of the street. A small band?twofifes, two trumpets, a trombone, and a side drum?follow it,playing a thin unidentifiable march. A dozen children scamper inits wake, picking up the unclaimed sweets. Some are in costume;I see Little Red Riding Hood and a shaggy person whomight be the wolf squabbling companionably over possession ofa handful of streamers.

    A black figure brings up the rear. At first I take him for a partof the parade?the Plague Doctor, maybe?but as he approachesI recognize the old-fashioned soutane of the countrypriest. He is in his thirties, though from a distance his rigidstance makes him seem older. He turns toward me, and I seethat he too is a stranger, with the high cheekbones and pale eyesof the north and long pianist's fingers resting on the silver crossthat hangs from his neck. Perhaps this is what gives him the rightto stare at me, this alienness; but I see no welcome in his cold,light eyes. Only the measuring, feline look of one who is uncertainof his territory. I smile at him; he looks away, startled; beckonsthe two children toward him. A gesture indicates the litterthat now lines the road; reluctantly the pair begin to clear it,scooping up spent streamers and candy wrappers in their armsand into a nearby bin. I catch the priest staring at me again as Iturn away, a look that in another man might have been ofappraisal.

    There is no police station at Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, thereforeno crime. I try to be like Anouk, to see beneath the disguiseto the truth, but for now everything is blurred.

    "Are we staying? Are we, maman?" She tugs at my arm, insistently."I like it, I like it here. Are we staying?"

    I catch her up into my arms and kiss the top of her head. Shesmells of smoke and frying pancakes and warm bedclothes on awinter's morning.

   ...