The Feasting Season — Nancy Coons

Meg Parker, an American travel-book writer, lives in the Lorraine countryside with her two small children and a neglectful husband. Domestic life is beginning to take its toll until Meg is offered her dream assignment: to write a guidebook about French history. Unfortunately, there is a catch. Jean-Jacques, a scruffy and imperious photographer, has been assigned to the project. As the dueling pair visits each region in search of the past, what they find is the colorful, food-filled present--the festive bullfights in the Camargue, the sacred gypsy pilgrimage at Stes-Maries-de-la-Mer, the pictographs and lightning storms of Mount Bego. And over the course of mouthwatering meals--of lamb daube, paella and rose, bull steak and anchioade, Brebis and strawberries--their antagonistic collaboration turns into a fiery love affair.

Meg's notions about history--about what we preserve and how we accept the new--evolve, and in the end, she must reconcile her two lives and decide what to hold on to, and what to let go.