Lunch with Elizabeth David

They meet by chance in 1940 - the debonair gastronome Norman Douglas and a stylish, slightly haughty, well-bred Elizabeth Gwynne - at a street market in the South of France. He lectures her on the marvels of tarragon, and in that seminal moment in Antibes begins the epicurean tutelage of the woman who became Elizabeth David, England's premier writer on continental cuisine, and who reeducated the palate of the English-speaking world with the robust flavors of Mediterranean living.In that moment, too, Elizabeth David enters the enchanted circle of Norman Douglas's friends, among them Graham Greene, Gracie Fields, Nancy Cunard, and, less famously but more significantly, Eric Walton, the man who has known him as Uncle Norman since 1910, when a boyish scrape during a fireworks display at Crystal Palace introduced a working-class kid from North London to the intriguing, worldly gentleman who would take him to the sun-drenched shores of southern Italy. From idyllic Mediterranean days in Calabria before World War I through the hardships and tensions of Vichy France to the drudgery of England's recovery from World War II and finally the affluence of high-living contemporary London, this evocative novel artfully charts a journey that ends with a perfect - and long-haunting - lunch on the island of Capri.