Staff Pick
British author Peter Mayle and his wife make real their dream of living in the French countryside when they purchase a 200-year-old stone farmhouse. When Mayle's publisher complains about the lateness of his expected manuscripts, Mayle writes back a detailed account of the trials and indignities he faces with the upkeep of said farmhouse. That letter to his publisher eventually becomes A Year in Provence, and the book is hilarious, charming, and nightmarish in equal measure. Mayle, at the center of this chaos, is the quintessential befuddled man-of-the-country, and he has the writing chops to tell you all about it. Hysterical! Recommended By Dianah H., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
They had been there often as tourists. They had cherished the dream of someday living all year under the Provencal sun. And suddenly it happened.
Here is the month-by-month account of the charms and frustrations that Peter Mayle and his wife -- and their two large dogs -- experience their first year in the remote country of the Luberon restoring a two-centuries-old stone farmhouse that they bought on sight. From coping in January with the first mistral, which comes howling down from the Rhone Valley and wreaks havoc with the pipes, to dealing as the months go by with the disarming promises and procrastination of the local masons and plumbers, Peter Mayle delights us with his strategies for survival. He relishes the growing camaraderie with his country neighbors -- despite the rich, soupy, often impenetrable patois that threatens to separate them. He makes friends with boar hunters and truffle hunters, a man who eats foxes, and another who bites dentists; he discovers the secrets of handicapping racing goats and of disarming vipers. And he comes to dread the onslaught of tourists who disrupt his tranquillity.
In this often hilarious, seductive book Peter Mayle manages to transport us info all the earthy pleasures of Provencal life and lets us live vicariously in a tempo governed by seasons, not by days. George Lang, who was smitten, suggests: "Get a glass of marc, lean back in your most comfortable chair, and spend a delicious year in Provence."
About the Author
Peter Mayle spent fifteen years in the advertising business, first as a copywriter and then as a reluctant executive, before escaping Madison Avenue in 1975 to write books. His work has been translated into seventeen languages, and he has contributed to the London Sunday Times, the Financial Times, and the Independent, as well as Gentlemen's Quarterly and Esquire. A Year in Provence, which has just been published in England, won the British Book Awards "Best Travel Book of the Year." He and his wife live in Provence.