Harper Perennial
May 2001
On Sale: May 1, 2001
Featuring: Jay Mackintosh; Marise
368 pages ISBN: 0380815923 EAN: 9780380815920 Paperback Add to Wish List
What if you could bottle a year of your past? Which one
would it be? Which time of year? What would it smell like?
How would it taste?
These are the questions which began Blackberry Wine: the
second volume of my "food trilogy" and the story of Jay
Mackintosh, a writer of pulp fiction with one literary
success to his name and a dwindling grasp of reality.
Trapped between an unresolved past and a humdrum present,
suffering from writer's block and the beginnings of
alcoholism, Jay has lost his bearings.
But the accidental discovery of six bottles of home-brewed
wine, a legacy from an old and vanished friend, seems to
hold the key to a new beginning, a means of escape, and a
final reconciliation. For there is something magical about
this wine; something which brings the past to life, an agent
of transformation. Under its influence, time can work
backwards and the dead return to life - as Jay finds, when,
on impulse, he gives up his glamorous London lifestyle and
escapes to a half-derelict farmhouse in a remote village in
Gascony, where two mysteries await him; a ghost from the
past whom no-one else can see, and Marise, a reclusive widow
with ghosts of her own...