Set in the Loire valley, near Angers, a backwater of a defeated nation, it sets childhood trauma and treachery within the frame of tragic history. Yet the Occupation impinges only on the edges of three troubled siblings' world. It's almost as if Wehrmacht and SS patrols stand guard on the boundaries of a Famous Five holiday idyll, stirring sometimes to intervene, with thrilling and (ultimately) horrific results.Many of the novel's vivid period touches stem from family stories. Harris's teacher grandfather managed to evade the Gestapo in a round-up at his school. "The entire family went on the run", to an isolated farmhouse. "What my mother remembers principally is not people being shot against the church wall ­ although that happened, and she knew some of them With a child, that doesn't impact.

What she remembers is that the Germans gave her sandwiches, and it was really quite exciting."In the figure of young Tomas, the German squaddie drawn into the dangerous games of three children running wild, Five Quarters creates the most sympathetic Axis soldier since Antonio Corelli. Like everyone else, his creator's mother called the Germans "Cacaboches" ("Krappykrauts", roughly). Yet "what she got across to me very strongly was that most of these people were just blokes a long way from home, doing the best they could." As for the Resistance... What Resistance? One pungent passage, drawn from her grandfather's memories, stresses that, "The one Resistance ­ the secret army of popular understanding ­ was a myth. There were many groups, communists and humanists and socialists and people seeking martyrdom and swaggarts and drunkards and opportunists and saints, all sanctified by time, but in those days nothing like an army, and hardly secret."In this land of furtive compromises, food and its preparation still preoccupy the women of a sturdy matriarchal lineage.

Local recipes are collected by the narrator's mother and fought over by pretentious foodies in the next generation. Yet this lore divides rather than unites, a bone of contention passed from mother to daughter. Even the titular orange ­ that wartime rarity ­ becomes a weapon in the family war."Mistakes get carried down the line, don't they, in families?" Harris comments. "Because as a mother what you tend to do is perpetuate what you were taught by your own mother. And if you had a bad mother, or a mother who made you unhappy, you still perpetuate it without even wanting to."In this book, the creamy, feelgood richness of Chocolat yields to the tart flavours and fibrous textures of brambly fruits and stubborn roots.

It turns a pitiless eye on the "envy and hypocrisy, false piety and greed" of small-town life. And its view of childhood shares more with William Golding than with Rousseau. Two key adjectives stand out from this portrait of a poisoned girlhood: one is "feral"; the other, "sly".Anyone who slides dreamily out of Chocolat at the multiplex to buy its author's latest offering may have a rude shock. Yet that will hardly faze a novelist who says briskly, "I am not in the world to live up to other people's expectations of me." She did just as she wished for long enough without the planet's attention not to change just because she has it.In Italy, that attention is especially rapt. Italian admirers have suggested "the most fabulous deals" if only Joanne Harris will turn her fictional gaze south of the Alps. One fan from Piedmont "has said that, if I will write a book about his region, then I can live in his castello for as long as I like." It's an offer she has to refuse. She cannot write about a place unblessed by the intimate presence of memory: "Just being there and looking at it isn't enough."So the novels will stick to those spots of western France that their author has known from the dreamy summer days of childhood.

Meanwhile, Yorkshire remains home ­ even though Oscar nominations and suchlike don't invariably win friends. "I believe that a lot of talking goes on in the pub," she says "Those who know me tend to say nothing. Those who don't, have their own, very vocal opinions." Her books ­ and especially Five Quarters ­ deserve to silence the latter. Although, personally, I wouldn't give an SS squad five minutes against a Barnsley snug bar in full cry.'Five Quarters of the Orange' is published by Doubleday at £12.99. An influential group of astronomers will make a powerful case today for returning men to the Moon, with the ambition of revitalising human spaceflight in the 21st century. An influential group of astronomers will make a powerful case today for returning men to the Moon, with the ambition of revitalising human spaceflight in the 21st century.At an international symposium in Cambridge, they will argue that the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (Nasa) faces extinction unless it looks beyond the only manned mission it is currently committed to ­ the massively expensive international space station.A return trip to the Moon, with the establishment of a lunar colony, is seen as a realistic vision for the development of the technology needed to explore Mars and beyond.Although Nasa is planning a series of robotic missions to Mars, many scientists believe only manned missions will determine whether there really is life beyond Earth. Such a project can succeed only if there is an established lunar base."No one has yet built a robot that duplicates or comes close to human judgement and flexibility," said Paul Spudis, based at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas.Dr Spudis, who will address a special symposium on manned spaceflight at the UK national astronomy meeting in Cambridge, said the vision was realistic and essential.