La Vie: A year in rural France

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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. There are so many things I enjoyed about this book which provided a glorious armchair excursion to rural life in France.

Lewis-Stempel is a one-man advertisement for agricultural viability and ecological sensitivity, and an upholder of local uniqueness. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. Over that first year, John falls in love with the French countryside and living the good life – or as the French say, La Vie. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.Readers of his many books and his Times nature columns will know how easily Lewis-Stempel's writing marries the lyrical with the descriptive. He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. A clear-eyed and unsentimental, yet utterly beguiling immersion in La France Profonde, keenly observed and beautifully told. Even if it doesn't make you want to move to France, you'll still wish you could open your window at night and hear that nightingale singing to you. 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.

He guides us with gusto around his tiny potager, his five-strong herd of Ouessant sheep with their coveted wool, his water lilies. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. Highly descriptive, going round the year in the life of a newly arrived English peasant farmer's perspective who is hard working and accepted by his French neighbours because of who he is.Mrs Woolf, wife of the manager, is a very celebrated author and, in her own way, more important than Galsworthy. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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). What I have particularly enjoyed is re-learning French word and slang which I only remembered when reading the book, things I learned at school over 40 years ago came back to me (the fables by Jean De La Fontaine were learned by rote in "conversational French" back then.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. Although it began as a practical enterprise, it quickly became an affair of the heart: of learning to bite the end off the morning baguette; taking two hours for lunch; in short, living the good life - or as the French say, La Vie .