The Feasting Season

by Coons, Nancy

• ISBN13: 9781565125193
• ISBN10: 1565125193
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2007-07-13
• Publisher: Algonquin Books

Summary

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 serious book 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 history, what they find is the colourful, food-filled present-day France'”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. The project, too, becomes a wholly unforeseen work: a history of France told through its food.

Author Biography

Nancy Coons is the author of Escape to Provence, Escape to the Riviera, Fodor’s Provence and the Cote d’Azur, andFodor’s Switzerland and a contributor to guides on France, Italy, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Her commentaries on French life have aired on NPR’s All Things Considered, and she has contributed to Saveur, the International Herald Tribune, the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Times. She lives in a three-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Lorraine region of France with her husband and two daughters.