The Historic Dordogne- June 13-19, 2010

Vianne Rocher and her 6-year-old daughter, Anouk, arrive in the small village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes--"a blip on the fast road between Toulouse and Bourdeaux"--in February, during the carnival. Three days later, Vianne opens a luxuriant chocolate shop crammed with the most tempting of confections and offering a mouth-watering variety of hot chocolate drinks. It's Lent, the shop is opposite the church and open on Sundays, and Francis Reynaud, the austere parish priest, is livid. One by one the locals succumb to Vianne's concoctions. Joanne Harris weaves their secrets and troubles, their loves and desires, into her third novel, with the lightest touch. There's sad, polite Guillame and his dying dog; thieving, beaten-up Joséphine Muscat; schoolchildren who declare it "hypercool" when Vianne says they can help eat the window display--a gingerbread house complete with witch. And there's Armande, still vigorous in her 80s, who can see Anouk's "imaginary" rabbit, Pantoufle, and recognizes Vianne for who she really is. However, certain villagers--including Armande's snobby daughter and Joséphine's violent husband--side with Reynaud. So when Vianne announces a Grand Festival of Chocolate commencing Easter Sunday, it's all-out war: war between church and chocolate, between good and evil, between love and dogma.

Set in the Dordogne region in southwestern France, Wan's debut, a French-flavored mystery with botanical window dressing, tracks the perilous search for a rare orchid and its long-missing hunter. Nineteen years after her identical twin sister, Bedie, disappeared on an orchid hunt in the Dordogne, interior decorator Mara Dunn (who relocated to the region) still can't let go. So when she discovers Bedie's camera—its roll of film intact—she approaches British orchidologist Julian Wood to help retrace her sister's last steps using the photographs of flowers. A picture of the exceedingly uncommon Lady's Slipper piques Julian's interest, and the pair are off, quarreling their way across the increasingly hazardous French countryside. The menacing locals aren't much help, including as they do the de Sauvignacs, an impoverished pair of elderly aristocrats and their sexy son, Alain, plus the Rochers, an incestuous mother-and-son pair who rob and abandon hitchhikers.

The February weather may be dark and dismal, but the locals provide plenty of color as "a newly installed Englishman" in rural southern France copes with odd neighbors (a secretive doctor, a reclusive Dutch woman, a goat-breeding English alcoholic) and odder fatal accidents in Louis Sanders's engaging debut, Death in the Dordogne, translated by Adriana Hunter. The genial narrator, lacking anything better to do, busies himself with investigating, and he turns up old grudges that lead to new crimes in the first of a series.

Eric Line's Dordogne Adventures transport the reader into the countryside of south-western France, with all its quaint traditions and local quirks, as he recounts how he and his wife made the transition from summer holidaymakers in their cottage, to full time residents. The minutiae of transforming the cottage into a home are juxtaposed with enjoyable jaunts with friends to local wine tasting. Anyone who has ever dreamed of life in the wine-growing regions will be delighted with this account.

A truly informative, lovely cookbook with great pictures, and most importantly, terrific recipes. The author has a real fondness for the region and knows her food.

Through the centuries, the Dordogne has cherished a tradition of fine cuisine that is famed throughout France, and the region has produced a disproportionate number of France's finest chefs: Brillat-Savarin, Careme, Escoffier, Andre Noel and, in our own times, Marcel Boulestin.

A group of American photographers take a trip to the Dordogne area of France. There they encounter beautiful scenery, great food and wine, interesting people, and a murder most foul. When a local celebrity is found dead, one of their group becomes the prime suspect. The mystery is solved; but, not without bringing to light many shadows in the Dordogne.

The discovery of a fragment of a prehistoric cave painting stirs up old passions in modern Europe in this busy, fact-driven fourth novel by commentator and journalist Walker (America Reborn). When Maj. Philip Manners approaches auction house expert Lydia Dean about an object inherited from his father, he expects merely to turn a quick profit. But Lydia is alarmed: the fragment appears to be from an uncharted French cave and was probably obtained illegally. It is stolen from the auction house, prompting an intense reaction from French President Fran‡ois Malrand. Having set up the theft as an elaborate McGuffin, Walker then shifts to the "V‚zere Valley, approximately 15,000 B.C.," and the story of how young cave-dwellers Little Moon and Keeper of the Deer fall tragically in love and defy authorities by painting with unprecedented realism. The story leaps ahead to 1944 France, to describe how Malrand, aided by Manners's father, Jack, and an uncouth American named McPhee trained the French Resistance to fight the Germans and in the process stumbled upon the cave.

Walk through a land of pure enchantment in this tour of a particularly lovely part of France, the southwestern area called the Dordogne, from the river that flows through it. Travel writer Bentley and outstanding photographer Palmer guide the reader from one charming, beautiful village to another. In large-format display, Palmer captures particularly evocative scenes, and in buoyant text, Bentley describes the physical appearance of each place and discusses local cuisine and the dramatic history in which the region is steeped.

Wan's sequel to her debut, Deadly Slipper (2005), nicely depicts an appealing village in the Dordogne, a part of France rarely seen as a fictional setting, and two lead characters with interesting vocations. Interior designer Mara Dunn is overseeing the restoration of a manor owned by Christophe de Bonfond, scion of the area's leading family, when workmen make a terrible discovery: the remains of an infant, wrapped in a silken shroud and buried inside the thick walls. This horror puts Mara and her sometime boyfriend Julian Wood, landscape designer and orchidologist, on a circuitous pathway of investigation that toggles back and forth between centuries and between rival branches of the aristocratic family.