La Vie: A year in rural France

Product Information

The baker does his rounds in his battered little white van with a hundred warm baguettes in the back, while a cat picks its way past a Romanesque church, the sound of bells skipping across miles of rolling, glorious countryside.

There are so many things I enjoyed about this book which provided a glorious armchair excursion to rural life in France.He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow. Over that first year, John falls in love with the French countryside and living the good life – or as the French say, La Vie. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In la France profonde the signs are more exotic, as John Lewis-Stempel discovers one February morning when his horse crashes through an electrified fence and bolts into a walnut orchard.

He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit. The descriptive writing of his walks in the area, the local wildlife, the local people and customs (and the attitudes of the French rural resident! The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow .Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal. John Lewis-Stempel's story of a year on his smallholding in the Charente is warm and vivid and beautiful.

A clear-eyed and unsentimental, yet utterly beguiling immersion in La France Profonde, keenly observed and beautifully told. Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. Slightly Foxed brings back forgotten voices through its Slightly Foxed and Plain Foxed Editions, a series of beautifully produced little pocket hardback reissues of classic memoirs, all of them absorbing and highly individual.John Lewis-Stempel sets off from the UK to the rural far west of France - la France profonde - where he and his wife settle to a farming life in a draughty house with a small menagerie of pets and farm animals and a few acres of vineyards. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly.

Readers of his many books and his Times nature columns will know how easily Lewis-Stempel's writing marries the lyrical with the descriptive.

Alternately inspiring and exasperating, La Vie has all but forced me to build a potager and frustrated my dreams of evening strolls with a dog (due to lack of said canine) but is so beautifully, simply written, I missed it when I had to put it down ( to dig potager and commence papier mache dog). For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned once again to live in a landscape where turtle doves purr and nightingales sing, as they did almost everywhere in his childhood. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.