By Bread Alone
by By Lynch, Sarah-Kate
Category: Fiction , General

For Esme MacDougall Stack, it began in an ancient underground boulangerie in southwest France. Here, with the scent of boules cooking in an oak-fired oven, artisan-baker Louis Lapoine introduced the innocent nineteen-year-old to the exquisite parallel pleasures of making bread and making love. Although their affair ended in heartbreak, for Esme, sensual joy and sourdough would forever after be inextricably entwined.Fifteen years later, Esme is living by the sea east of London with her husband, Pog, their four-and-a-half-year-old son, and her grandmother and father-in-law. Esme may no longer be the career-driven, model-thin girl she once was, yet throughout her marriage, one thing has remained a blissful, eagerly awaited constant: Every day she has risen at the crack of dawn to bake sourdough bread from scratch, lovingly kneading the dough from the starter Louis once gave her. But now a major domestic crisis looms. It has been exactly thirty-three days since Esme baked a loaf, and her family fears that their home - the wonderfully eccentric House in the Clouds - will never again smell of crust and comfort.Then, just when Esme is ready to take her life firmly in hand again, an unexpected encounter in a London restaurant sends her world careening wildly off its axis - forcing her to come to terms with the past and a tragedy that has been haunting her for the past two years.