Her strongest writing yet: as tangy and sometimes bitter as Chocolat was smooth

Outstanding ... beautifully written

Joanne Harris a naturally sensuous writer, but her latest book has a dark core...Her descriptive and narrative talents are put to a profounder use...This gripping tale is bound to be made into a film. It's as vivid a journey through human cruelty and kindness as I've read this year

Harris indulges her love of rich and mouthwatering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses ... Thoroughly enjoyable

Just as she did in Chocolat, Harris indulges her love of rich and mouth-watering descriptive passages, appealing to the senses with seductively foreign names, and evoking the textures and smells of food. These descriptions are suffused with a child's wide-eyed wonder that lends the story a magical quality, almost like a folk tale or a children's story. Even having the Occupation as a backdrop, Harris sets out to tell a story that proves, like her previous books, to be thoroughly enjoyable...

Harris's vividly sensual account of a nine-year-old's loves, loyalties and misunderstandings is a powerful and haunting story of childhood betrayal

Joanne Harris is masterly in her conjuring of the sense of time and place in the wartime segments of the book, and with almost poetic style she brings to life the smell of country cooking, and the movement of fish in the Loire and the stifling smell of orange oil

The pace and balance of the book make it as enjoyable as Chocolat

The author of the Whitbread-shortlisted Chocolat must win more plaudits for this elegant and epicurean novel permeated with the tantalizing flavours of rustic France

If you enjoyed Chocolat and Blackberry Wine, you are certainly ready to embark on this journey back to war-torn France, an unresolved past and a fraught future

Evocative descriptions of food and rural France are what we have come to expect from the best-selling author of Chocolat. With recipes and luscious depictions of food, this is the perfect book for a gastronome

Harris's prose is deeply evocative - the scent of freshly baked bread, fruit and wine and oranges rises off the pages. Darker than her other novels and less sentimental, this is a wonderful book; don't miss out

Harris presents a complicated but beautiful tale involving misfortune, mystery and intense family relations ... This intense work brims with sensuality and sensitivity

Rich in detail, engaging all the senses and drawing one compulsively on to the unexpected climax

As lyrically succulent as Chocolat and Blackberry Wine, this book probes darker corners of loss, enmity and betrayal

Hugely enjoyable

Vastly enjoyable, utterly gripping

A dark, gripping tale of how smell leads to tragedy and murder. Harris's vividly sensual account of a nine-year-olds loves, loyalties and misunderstandings is a powerful and haunting story of childhood betrayal

Five Quarters of the Orange completes a hat-trick of food-titled tales with a riveting story about a young girl brought up in occupied France who's now an old woman harbouring a terrible secret. Harris is light-years ahead of her contemporaries. She teases you with snippets of a bigger story, gently pulling you in with her vivid descriptions of rural France until you can actually smell the oranges. Read it

Beautifully told, it's a haunting and tantalizing tale that stays with you long after turning the last page

The luscious prose, abounding in culinary metaphors and similes, which made Chocolat so readable, is once more in evidence ... a satisfying page-turner

This shape-shifting drama switches easily between Occupied France and the present day. Recipes for luscious meals and homebrewed liqueurs interlace a storyline that spoons suspense and black humour into the blender in equal measure

Harris is an acute observer of the lush French countryside, and her descriptions of it are a delight ... A luscious feast of a book

Joanne Harris's rather brilliant Five Quarters of the Orange is a fascinating page-turner with a compelling climax ... This is an absolutely remarkable book that deserves to be read over and over again

Harris' love affair with food and France continues. Savour it

Harris evocatively balances the young Framboise's perspectives on life against grown-up truths with compelling, zestful flair

The dreamy and almost fair-tale narrative remains undisturbed by the spectre of the Occupation, as Harris avoids moral or historical themes, to ponder on the internal and social turmoil of the protagonists ... Harris seduces her readers with culinary delights, through suggestive textures and smells which indulge the senses

Harris has a gift for injecting magic into the everyday ... She is an old-fashioned writer in the finest sense, believing in a strong narrative, fully rounded characters, a complex plot, even a moral

Gripping ... Harris is on assured form