Death and Fromage
Escape to the Paris Cheese Shop
Edward Trencom’s Nose
The Cheesemaker’s Daughter
The Telling RoomCrime thriller set in AMSTERDAM
Five Great Books that Focus on Cheese
2nd October 2025
Five great books that focus on cheese.
Is cheese the new reason to travel? asks BBC Travel
“From Paris’s newly opened cheese museum to ageing caves in the Jura and sheep pastures in Corsica, travellers are discovering that cheese can be a guidebook through landscapes, traditions and histories they might otherwise miss.”
In France a growing number of travellers are discovering the country through its cheese. It is already possible to follow “Route de Fromage”, a way of connecting with the countryside that produces specific cheese and discovering the variety of terroirs that abound in the country. And it is predicted that food focussed travel is set to rise.
Now Paris has opened a new Musée de Fromage, in the heart of the city, a “Tasty Museum dedicated to French cheese heritage” where visitors can learn about production and heritage. It is designed, in part, to encourage vocation amongst young people as well as appealing to broader groups of people who just want to understand more about all things cheese.
You can read the full article on this LINK.
We have pulled together five top reads that revolve around cheese, for a full and immersive cheese experience!
Death and Fromage by Ian Moore (Loire)
Richard is a middle-aged Englishman who runs a B&B in the Vallée de Follet. Nothing ever happens to Richard, and really that’s the way he likes it.
Until scandal erupts in the nearby town of Saint-Sauver when its famous restaurant is downgraded from three ‘Michelin’ stars to two. The restaurant is shamed, the town is in shock and the leading goat’s cheese supplier drowns himself in one of his own pasteurisation tanks. Or does he?
Valérie d’Orçay, who staying at the B&B while house-hunting in the area, isn’t convinced that it’s a suicide. Despite his misgivings, Richard is drawn into Valérie’s investigation, and finds himself becoming a major player.
Escape to the Paris Cheese Shop by Victoria Brownlee (Paris)
Who needs love when you can eat cheese?
Heartbroken and on the cusp of turning 30, Ella decides to pack her bags and move to Paris, somewhere she had visited when she was a different, more adventurous person.
It’s on the streets of beautiful, romantic Paris that she finds her heart’s true desire: cheese. And with the help of Serge, the owner of the local fromagerie, she sets herself a challenge: eat a different kind of cheese every day for the next year.
But it’s not plain sailing, and with the turn of the seasons, Ella finds that there are many distractions to be had in the love capital of the world, mainly in the form of a very sexy Frenchman called Gaston…
Edward Trencom’s Nose by Giles Milton (City of London)
Edward Trencom has bumbled through life, relying on his trusty nose to turn the family cheese shop into the most celebrated fromagerie in England. But his world is turned upside down when he stumbles across a crate of family papers. To his horror, Edward discovers that nine previous generations of his family have come to sticky ends because of their noses. When he investigates further, Edward finds himself caught up in a Byzantine riddle to which there is no obvious answer . . .
The Cheesemaker’s Daughter by Kristin Vuković (Croatia)
In the throes of an unraveling marriage, New Yorker Marina Maržić returns to her native Croatian island where she helps her father with his struggling cheese factory, Sirana. Forced to confront her divided Croatian-American identity and her past as a refugee from the former Yugoslavia, Marina moves in with her parents on Pag and starts a new life working at Sirana. As she gradually settles back into a place that was once home, her life becomes inextricably intertwined with their island’s cheese. When her past with the son of a rival cheesemaker stokes further unrest on their divided island, she must find a way to save Sirana—and in the process, learn to belong on her own terms.
Exploring underlying cultural and ethnic tensions in a complex region mired in centuries of war and turmoil, The Cheesemaker’s Daughter takes us through the year before Croatia joins the European Union. On the dramatic moonscape island of Pag, we are transported to strikingly barren vistas, medieval towns, and the mesmerizing Adriatic Sea, providing a rare window into a tight-knit community with strong family ties in a corner of the world where divisions are both real and imagined. Asking questions central to identity and the meaning of home, this richly drawn story reckons with how we survive inherited and personal traumas, and what it means to heal and reinvent oneself in the face of life’s challenges.
The Telling Room by Michael Paterniti (Spain)
In the picturesque village of Guzmán, Spain, in a cave dug into a hillside on the edge of town, an ancient door leads to a cramped limestone chamber known as the telling room. Containing nothing but a wooden table and two benches, this is where villagers have gathered for centuries to share their stories and secrets usually accompanied by copious amounts of wine.
It was here, in the summer of 2000, that Michael Paterniti found himself listening to a larger-than-life Spanish cheesemaker named Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras as he spun an odd and compelling tale about a piece of cheese. An unusual piece of cheese. Made from an old family recipe, Ambrosio’s cheese was reputed to be among the finest in the world, and was said to hold mystical qualities. Eating it, some claimed, conjured long-lost memories. But then, Ambrosio said, things had gone horribly wrong. . . .
By the time the two men exited the telling room that evening, Paterniti was hooked. Soon he was fully embroiled in village life, relocating his young family to Guzmán in order to chase the truth about this cheese and explore the fairy tale like place where the villagers conversed with farm animals, lived by an ancient Castilian code of honour, and made their wine and food by hand, from the grapes growing on a nearby hill and the flocks of sheep floating over the Meseta.
What Paterniti ultimately discovers there in the highlands of Castile is nothing like the idyllic slow-food fable he first imagined. Instead, he’s sucked into the heart of an unfolding mystery, a blood feud that includes accusations of betrayal and theft, death threats, and a murder plot. As the village begins to spill its long-held secrets, Paterniti finds himself implicated in the very story he is writing.
Equal parts mystery and memoir, travelogue and history, The Telling Room is an astonishing work of literary nonfiction by one of our most accomplished storytellers. A moving exploration of happiness, friendship, and betrayal, The Telling Room introduces us to Ambrosio Molinos de las Heras, an unforgettable real-life literary hero, while also holding a mirror up to the world, fully alive to the power of stories that define and sustain us.
Tina for the TripFiction Team
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