Tapestry of Love by Rosy Thornton

I found Rosy Thorton’s new book Tapestry of Love an absorbing read. It took me a couple of chapters to adjust to the pace - it's gentler than the average hectic modern novel at first, but increasingly I found myself drawn into Catherine's charmingly down-to-earth French rural world. Here’s a blurb “A ..story of how a woman falls in love with a place and its people: a landscape, a community and a fragile way of life. A rural idyll: that's what Catherine is seeking when she sells her house in England and moves to a tiny hamlet in the Cévennes mountains. With her divorce in the past and her children grown, she is free to make a new start, and her dream is to set up in business as a seamstress. But this is a lonely place when you're no longer just here on holiday. There is French bureaucracy to contend with, not to mention the mountain weather, and the reserve of her neighbours, including the intriguing Patrick Castagnol. And that's before the arrival of Catherine's sister, Bryony.” As the story moved quietly along, I had time to appreciate the wonderful descriptions of the scenery and the people, and to get to know sensible Catherine, who is not patronising towards her farming neighbours, who automatically puts others first and who does not protest at the behaviour of her pushy sister.  With attention to detail, like her heroine, Rosy Thornton writes well and movingly about family relationships, loss and love.

The novel attracted numerous positive reviews in blogland, e.g. at LitLove. If you would like any of the Cévenne recipes in the novel, just contact Rosie via her website, and she’ll send you a list of them. Luckily for me she sent me both the book and the recipes. Among others, I particularly fancied the thought of raspberries with raspberry liqueur.  And she gives substitutes for ingredients like wild boar that might be tricky to source in Hampshire.