It has been an exhilarating three weeks of the autumn book tour, with readings in Austria, Switzerland and Germany, along with three busy days at the Frankfurt book fair.

The highlight of this tour has been the culinary-literary evenings,thanks to the new Bruno cook book, which inspired many of the bookstores to arrange dinners of Perigord food and Bergerac wine to accompany the readings. 

There were some notable dinners,at some of my favourite bookshops in Klagenfurt, Oberursel and Olten, and at the Michelin-starred Schloss Leursfeld near Cologne. 

There were memorable meals at the Matrkgraf in Neustadt, the Kulinarium in Murrhardt, the Bombay in Offenburg, the Klag-Buhne in Gaggenau and the venerable Wurttemburg Automobile Club in Stuttgart.

It was splendid to see so many old friends among the booksellers and the German readers, Angela Spitzig, Marguerite von Schwarzkopf, Heinrich Baumgartner and Jo Jung. 

Now on the last lap, for a reading at another favourite bookstore right by Charlemagne's Dom in Aachen and a second also in Aachen with a dinner dinner in Aachen and then the Braunschweig Krimi festival to come.

The Bruno cookbook came out at the end of September, and by the time the Frankfurt book fair was over on October 9 it was number one on the Focus best-seller list for lifestyle books and had gone into its third printing. 

It is not a conventional cookbook, not a product of stylists and studios whose glossy photos could never be produced by anyone cooking at home. 

Every photo of food in this book was taken as the dish came out of our family kitchen in our house in Perigord.

The book is organised around the people who produce it, the gardeners and farmers, the hunters and fishermen, the cheese-makers and bakers, the wine-makers and  the foragers in the woods for truffles and wild herbs and mushrooms. And it comes with Bruno's cooking tips, with new short stories about Bruno and his friends and neighbours in St Denis.

Usually a writer works alone, but this time I was part of a team with Klaus Einwanger the brilliant photographer, with Kobi the book designer and with my glorious wife Julia, whose idea it was in the first place. And we are all very proud of it.

In Germany for the launch of the German-language edition of the Bruno Cookbook - the English language version is coming soon - I found a poster promoting the book with a giant photo of me. I had to pose alongside my Brobdingnagian likeness...