La Vie: A year in rural France

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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! For many years a farmer in England, John Lewis-Stempel yearned to live in a rural landscape as he did in childhood. John Lewis-Stempel's story of a year on his smallholding in the Charente is warm and vivid and beautiful . 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. 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).

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. 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. 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.Lewis-Stempel is a one-man advertisement for agricultural viability and ecological sensitivity, and an upholder of local uniqueness. The Hogarth Press where I’m working, is in the heart of the literary world, with authors coming in all the time. The book is in effect a year's journal of John and his family moving to rural France, (an area I have visited as I have friends who live an hour away from this place).

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After calming the terrified animal, Lewis-Stempel leads him back to his field where the cause of the alarm is revealed: a fire salamander, basking in the sunshine. This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees.

But as three species of lizard emerged from hibernation to join the party, he realises that’s how you know winter has passed in Charente-Maritime. 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.He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit .

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.The Charente: roofs of red terracotta tiles, bleached-white walls, windows shuttered against the blaring sun. Slightly Foxed introduces its readers to books that are no longer new and fashionable but have lasting appeal.