The Olive Harvest

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504078721
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 321

Book Description
The story of life on a French olive farm continues with this moving memoir of hard work, hard luck, and waiting for the return of happiness. Carol Drinkwater and her husband, Michel, arrive at their villa in Provence in anticipation of another glorious summer. Unfortunately, they find the farm unkempt and suffering from lack of rainfall. When their gardener, Monsieur Quashia, finally shows up, he cheerfully explains the shed-building project he’s working on as a surprise for them—a surprise that will send their expenses skyrocketing. But there are bigger problems to come than wild boars tearing through fences and other everyday challenges of farming. After a terrifying accident in Monte Carlo and a hospital stay, Michel is barely functional, and Carol soon realizes she must fend for herself. Burdened with problems from a financial reversal to the threat of nearby wildfires, she will experience firsthand the uncertainties that have plagued farmers since the dawn of agriculture—and hold on to hope that in the end, nature will provide. “A storyteller of great economy and deftness.” —The Telegraph

The Olive Farm

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0142001309
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 337

Book Description
When Carol Drinkwater and her fiancé, Michel, are given the opportunity to purchase ten acres of an abandoned olive farm in the South of France, they find the region's splendor impossible to resist. Using their entire savings as a down payment, the couple embark on an adventure that brings them in contact with the charming countryside of Provence, its querulous personalities, petty bureaucracies, and extraordinary wildlife. From the glamour of Cannes and the Isles of Lérins to the charm of her own small plot of land-which she transforms from overgrown weeds into a thriving farm-Drinkwater triumphantly relates how she realized her dream of a peaceful, meaningful life.

The Olive Route

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 150407873X
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 382

Book Description
The author of acclaimed memoirs about life on a French olive farm explores the larger history and culture of the Mediterranean delicacy. Carol Drinkwater has a passion for olive trees and the fruit they bear—“bitter berries” that are transformed into savory delights and pressed into precious oil. Already intimately familiar with the fruit thanks to her olive farm in the South of France, she decided to travel throughout the Mediterranean basin—from Marseille to Malta, Israel to Tunisia—in a quest to learn about their ancient history, their spread throughout the world, and the tastes and traditions they represent. A culinary travelogue and a celebration of a humble, healthful food that inspires devotion among so many, The Olive Route is filled with unusual characters and fascinating anecdotes from “a storyteller of great economy and deftness” (The Telegraph). “Drinkwater has a sharp eye for character, and the people who populate The Olive Route will not disappoint her fans.” —The Independent

The Olive Season

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Open Road Media
ISBN: 1504078713
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 318

Book Description
“A lovely balance of memoir, travelogue and olive-growing how-to . . . Some of her adventures are quite funny.” —Publishers Weekly In this memoir, the author of The Olive Farm returns to the ten-acre property for which she and her fiancé scraped together their savings to buy—just back from their wedding on a tiny Polynesian island, loaded down with luggage and a large hand-painted didgeridoo. As Carol and Michel settle in as husband and wife, they experience the glamor of southern France at dinner parties in the company of aristocrats and at the world-renowned Cannes film festival, as well as the dirt-caked, sun-baked life of farmers—especially after their gardener heads to Algiers to arrange his youngest son’s wedding. For Carol, though, what matters most is that her longtime dream of motherhood finally promises to come true—and over the course of The Olive Season, she shares the story of her hopes and fears as she anticipates another kind of growth and nurturing. Alternately entertaining and emotionally poignant, this memoir is a rich portrait of love, longing, and the constant uncertainties of the cycle of life.

The Olive Farm

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson
ISBN: 9780753829349
Category : Farms
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
When Drinkwater and her fianc get the opportunity to purchase an abandoned olive farm in the South of France, they find the region's splendor impossible to resist. The couple embarks on an adventure that brings them in contact with the charming countryside of Provence, its querulous personalities, petty bureaucracies, and extraordinary wildlife.

Olive Odyssey

Author: Julie Angus
Publisher: Greystone Books
ISBN: 1771000066
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 213

Book Description
This Mediterranean travel memoir offers “an engaging mix of history, food travelogue, and botany lesson . . . There is much to enjoy here” (Library Journal). Inspired by her Syrian forebears’ intimate relationship with the olive, Julie Angus embarks on a voyage around the Mediterranean to unlock the secrets of the fruit that meant so much to them. Accompanied by her husband and their ten-month-old son, Angus collects samples from ancient trees to determine where the first olive tree originated; feasts on inky black tapenades and codfish drizzled with olive oil, among many other delights; witnesses the harvesting of olives in Greece; and visits perhaps the oldest olive tree in the world, on Crete. The result is a fascinating history and biography of this most influential and irresistible fruit. “It is a pleasure to try to keep up with this book; like its author, it covers an enormous amount of territory.” —Christopher Bakken, Wall Street Journal

On the Noodle Road

Author: Jen Lin-Liu
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101616199
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 358

Book Description
A food writer travels the Silk Road, immersing herself in a moveable feast of foods and cultures and discovering some surprising truths about commitment, independence, and love. As a newlywed traveling in Italy, Jen Lin-Liu was struck by culinary echoes of the delicacies she ate and cooked back in China, where she’d lived for more than a decade. Who really invented the noodle? she wondered, like many before her. But also: How had food and culture moved along the Silk Road, the ancient trade route linking Asia to Europe—and what could still be felt of those long-ago migrations? With her new husband’s blessing, she set out to discover the connections, both historical and personal, eating a path through western China and on into Central Asia, Iran, Turkey, and across the Mediterranean. The journey takes Lin-Liu into the private kitchens where the headscarves come off and women not only knead and simmer but also confess and confide. The thin rounds of dough stuffed with meat that are dumplings in Beijing evolve into manti in Turkey—their tiny size the measure of a bride’s worth—and end as tortellini in Italy. And as she stirs and samples, listening to the women talk about their lives and longings, Lin-Liu gains a new appreciation of her own marriage, learning to savor the sweetness of love freely chosen.

The Olive Tree

Author: Carol Drinkwater
Publisher: Hachette UK
ISBN: 0297857509
Category : Travel
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Book Description
In the bestselling Olive series by writer and actress Carol Drinkwater, author of THE FORGOTTEN SUMMER 'She writes so well you can almost smell the sun-baked countryside' BELLA 'Her writing captures the true spirit of the people and places she visits' THE TIMES 'A thrilling tale tracing the journey of olive cultivation' THE LADY THE OLIVE TREE charts Carol Drinkwater's colourful and often dangerous journey in search of the routes that olive cultivation has taken over the centuries. Set during a springtime Mediterranean that is evocative and perennial, it is above all a tale of our time. Troubled by challenges her own South of France farm is experiencing, Carol realises new approaches to farming are becoming essential. Her quest takes her south through Spain, Morocco, Algeria and Italy before she finally returns to her farm. Through her travels and vivid encounters, Carol confronts some of the critical issues of our time - land-care and the harsh realities of diminishing water reserves - and ends her momentous journey in the company of olive growers whose vision for the future is remarkable and ingenious.

Adventures on the Wine Route

Author: Kermit Lynch
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 9780374522667
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
Kermit Lynch's recounting of his experiences on the wine route and in the wine cellars of France takes the reader through the Loire, Bordeaux, the Languedoc, Provence, Northern and Southern Rhone, and the Cote d'Or.

Olive the Lionheart

Author: Brad Ricca
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1250207029
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
"Brad Ricca’s Olive MacLeod is my favorite sort of woman from history—bold and unconventional, utterly unsinkable—and her story is so full of adventure and acts of courage, it’s hard to believe she actually lived. And yet she did! Brad Ricca has found a heroine for the ages, and written her tale with a winning combination of accuracy and imagination." — Paula McLain, author of Love and Ruin and The Paris Wife From the Edgar-nominated author of the bestselling Mrs. Sherlock Holmes comes the true story of a woman's quest to Africa in the 1900s to find her missing fiancé, and the adventure that ensues. In 1910, Olive MacLeod, a thirty-year-old, redheaded Scottish aristocrat, received word that her fiancé, the famous naturalist Boyd Alexander, was missing in Africa. So she went to find him. Olive the Lionheart is the thrilling true story of her astonishing journey. In jungles, swamps, cities, and deserts, Olive and her two companions, the Talbots, come face-to-face with cobras and crocodiles, wise native chiefs, a murderous leopard cult, a haunted forest, and even two adorable lion cubs that she adopts as her own. Making her way in a pair of ill-fitting boots, Olive awakens to the many forces around her, from shadowy colonial powers to an invisible Islamic warlord who may hold the key to Boyd’s disappearance. As these secrets begin to unravel, all of Olive’s assumptions prove wrong and she is forced to confront the darkest, most shocking secret of all: why she really came to Africa in the first place. Drawing on Olive’s own letters and secret diaries, Olive the Lionheart is a love story that defies all boundaries, set against the backdrop of a beautiful, unconquerable Africa. This book is not for sale in the United Kingdom.