When Joanne Harris followed two obscure early novels with Chocolat (1999), she suddenly made herself into one of the most celebrated of contemporary English novelists. That novel became a best-seller and in 2000 was made into a successful motion picture; moreover, it gathered interest and even love among readers--a majority of them women--attracted by the author's combination of sensuous evocativeness, particularly of French life; powerful and perhaps somewhat old-fashioned plotting; and touches of the supernatural. In the three years following the publication of Chocolat she has published a novel each year. The first three have been called the "food trilogy," both because their titles mention food and drink and because Harris is concerned with food and describes it artfully. Harriet Lane, in an interview for BBC News Online (14 March 2002), referred to her as the inventor of "gastromance." Her 2002 novel, Coastliners, is not unconcerned with food but shifts scene--to another part...