Author Joanne Harris tackles clashes of culture and religion in her latest novel. But, as she tells Hannah Stephenson, she’s not holding her breath for another movie starring Johnny Depp

FORMER teacher and now best-selling author Joanne Harris is busy preparing for a major book tour of the UK followed by promotions in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and the US.

“It’s nice to be in demand,” she reflects.

“I find that the attitude of people in different countries to literature varies enormously.

“If I’m in Scandinavia, they tend to ask me very intellectual questions about the themes and metaphors and the process of writing, whereas if I go to Italy, they tend to ask me more lifestyle questions and about cooking and relationships.

“And if I go to the States, they want to know about movies and if I got to meet Johnny Depp.”

Fans of her best-selling novel Chocolat, which was made into a hit movie starring Depp and Juliette Binoche in 2000, are now clamouring for a copy of Peaches For Monsieur Le Cure, the third in the series featuring the same characters, following on from The Lollipop Shoes.

It is set eight years on, when the deliciously sinful chocolate shop in the rural French village of Lansquenet is now a ruined building owned by a mysterious incomer Ines Bencharki, her face hidden by a niqab (a veil worn by Muslim women).

The village priest, Father Reynaud, has become the outcast amid a community of Moroccans on one side of the river and locals on the other, and finds an unlikely ally in the form of Vianne Rocher, his former enemy who once owned the chocolate shop and has now returned.

Set during Ramadan, Harris has taken the bold step of focusing her story on how the two different cultures and religions clash, moving boldly into territory which more cautious writers might avoid.

“I wrote it during the year when a lot of European countries were talking about banning the veil, in that period of political debate and protest and upheaval. About two months after Ramadan they did ban the veil in France, so the story was shaped to some extent by current events.

“Human nature is such that people tend to justify all sorts of things by putting forward arguments, be they religious or political or otherwise, to justify their bad behaviour or to create a ’them and us’ situation.

“Historically, religion has been used to make it OK to be mean in one way or another to another group of people.”

While she’s reluctant to go into the politics of it, Harris, who is half French, says that the French dealt with the issue of banning the Islamic full veil in public poorly.

“They took something that had a certain amount of rational justification and made it into a situation which was bound to go bad – and it has done.

“On the other hand, I don’t like the veil. It has been put forward as something that is necessary and Islamic when actually it’s not really.

“It’s very much disputed whether the Koran even refers to a full veil at all. It’s a personal choice at best and at worst it can be all kinds of things which range from a way of keeping women apart and stopping them from interacting, or of deliberately not wanting to interact with other people.”

Living in Huddersfield helped her research into different cultures, says the 48-year-old.

“I’m surrounded by ethnic groups, I know plenty of Muslim people and some are very devout and some less so. It’s quite easy to imagine the situation condensed into a little French village.”

Harris herself felt like an outsider during her formative years. Born in Yorkshire, the daughter of teachers, her father met her French mother on an exchange in Brittany and brought her back to live above his parents’ sweetshop. The family spoke French at home and she always felt a bit different.

“Being brought up in the north of England, we were very foreign. There were very few foreigners in Barnsley, where we lived, and we were considered very strange.

“As a small child, I remember my mother taking me to school and the other mothers hearing us speaking in French and physically moving away because it was that peculiar. There was a lot of suspicion and a certain amount of fear.

“I was teased at school. I was the French girl. There was one boy who was black and one girl who was Chinese and we were the only three foreign people in the whole school.”

Recently, she’s had a posh shed built in the grounds of her Almondbury home to which she can escape to write and not be disturbed by telephones, wi-fi or other distractions. Her new short story collection will be coming out in the autumn.

Time will tell if she re-introduces the Chocolat characters in another volume.

“I’ve revisited these people three times and it’s a good bet that I will again at some point. But when it will happen I don’t know.”

Peaches For Monsieur Le Cure by Joanne Harris is published today by Doubleday, priced £18.99.