Taste of the sun

Saturday is market day in Apt. It’s hot and the streets are thronged. The locals keep to the southern end of town where the fruit and vegetable stall on the edge of the big car park gives the best value. The further north towards the Hotel de Ville you go, battling all the tourists of August, the steeper the prices and the prettier the displays.

Provence is the land of tomatoes and olives and garlic and olive oil, and if it’s possible to combine these health-giving ingredients in any way, you will find the result here. You can buy them mashed into unappealing-looking but delicious pulps, or preserved pure, like these delicious sun-dried tomatoes with whole cloves of garlic that are lightly pickled, crunchy and slightly sweet.



Black olive paste - tapenade - is the staple to eat on tiny crispy toasts as an accompaniment to the first drink of the evening. Or there’s anchoïade, a purée of preserved anchovies, olive oil and garlic, to eat with crispy raw vegetables. There’s a stall about halfway down the Rue des Marchands that offers the best you will ever taste.

I’m trying to relax and eat well in the sun this weekend. What do you mean, “try!?” you’re asking. Well, I get very nervous before big events, and next Tuesday is one of the biggest of my writing life: The Lantern is published in the USA and Canada. It’s been going pretty well in Britain, and over the past few weeks the Italian and the Croatian rights have been sold to add to the other foreign territory sales. But this is the big one, the first time I’ve been published in America.

The thousands of free ARCs sent out by HarperCollins to introduce a new author into the book marketplace have produced some lovely reviews on Amazon and Goodreads, and some not so good. Some readers don’t know what to make of it: too descriptive; too frustrating to have dual timeframes. Not the easy, genre Gothic read they were expecting. Fair enough. I’m very at ease with the idea that no book will work for everyone: that’s the magic of reading. I don’t enjoy every book I open and neither does anyone else.

But Oprah’s organisation likes it (yes, the legendary Oprah!) - here – and yesterday it reached the dizzy heights of a mention in the Short List in the Wall Street Journal - here. So cross your fingers for me, and hope there aren’t too many rotten tomatoes next week…