BLACKBERRY WINE

Harris (Chocolat, 1999) returns with a charming fairy tale for grown-ups, including all those seductive elements of contemporary fantasies: a house in the French countryside, potions and healers with the power to transform, love that is always tender, if seldom convincing.

Now in his 30s, Jay Mackintosh has failed to produce a successor to the acclaimed novel celebrating English village life that he wrote ten years ago. Jay puts bread on the table with science-fiction thrillers cranked out under a pseudonym, but otherwise he has a serious case of writer's block. Then one night Jay opens one of old Joe Cox's fruit wines and starts recalling the summers he spent working with Joe in his garden on Pog Hill in the former mining town of Kirby Monckton. Jay's lonely adolescent summers (his wealthy parents had separated) were transformed by meeting retired coal miner Joe, and these memories alternate with the sudden changes in his present life in London. The day after drinking the bottle of wine, Jay receives a brochure in the mail advertising a château for sale in the heart of the Dordogne. He thinks it's a sign from long-lost Joe, a healer, potion-maker, and fabulist who always talked of one day owning a château in France. Energized, Jay buys the château, leaves London and girlfriend Kerry, and becomes the lord of a crumbling but promising French estate. There, he meets a colorful range of rural characters who soon make him feel welcome, but he's most intrigued by his neighbor, the beautiful but elusive young widow Marise, and her supposedly deaf daughter, Rosa. As Jay begins writing a new novel, clearing the property, and planting as his mentor had taught him, a disembodied Joe appears to counsel and criticize. Jay learns why the villagers shun Marise and, in a story that can only end well, finds the happiness he lost when Joe disappeared from Pog Hill 20 years ago.

Sweet and lite.