THE WEDDING BEES is a novel about finding sweetness where you least expect it and learning to love your way home.

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.

Joseph Corrigan and Joseph Feehan, better known as Corrie and Fee, make the finest Coolarney Blue cheese in the entire civilized world. But Corrie still pines for his long-lost granddaughter, whisked away from her Ireland home as a child by her gallivanting mother. At this very moment, in a primitive hut on a remote South Seas island, his twenty-nine-year-old granddaughter Abbey is getting ready to leave her irrigation-obsessed husband after discovering that he has gone biblical with several of the natives.