Author: Peter Mayle

Mayle's account of his first year in Provence describes everything -- the local cuisine, hilarious tips for wooing fickle French contractors, handicapping goat races, enduring winter's icy mistral and more.

Here is the month-by-month account of the charms and frustrations that he and his wife experience during 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, 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 Mayle manages to transport us into the pleasures of Provencal life and lets us live vicariously in a tempo governed by seasons, not 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."