ON HALLOWEEN morning, the shed in Joanne Harris’s garden had transformed into a yellow pumpkin whose colour darkened to burnt-orange throughout the course of the day and lit up inside at night.
The following day it had turned into a carnival hall of mirrors, all of which showed her as short and squat.
The day before it had been a small, high window with a restricted view of pigs on the wing.
This is, at least, how she described it to her 4,600-plus Twitter followers – the word “shed” always beginning with a capital letter as if it were an animate being.
It is inside this small stone construction, with its reclaimed slate roof and oak-framed windows, that Harris disappears into the different worlds of her imagination.
At the moment she is making regular visits to France to find out what Vianne Rocher and her daughter Anouk are up for the third novel in a series that began with Chocolat, later turned into a film starring Juliette Binoche and Johnny Depp.
