Book review: In Broken Light, Joanne Harris takes a justifiably enraged swipe at the patriarchy

It’s not a criticism, but Joanne Harris’s best-known work does tend toward the nostalgic. The Chocolat series, which did very nicely indeed even before the film adaptation starring a never-more-gorgeous Johnny Depp and Juliette Binoche sent sales into the stratosphere, is set in the small, imagined, French village of Lansquenet-sous-Tannes.

Several other Harris novels (including Gentlemen and Players and A Narrow Door) feature St Oswald’s school, an old-world institution that still employs a gown-wearing classics ...