La Vie: A year in rural France

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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.

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). There are so many things I enjoyed about this book which provided a glorious armchair excursion to rural life in France. 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. 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 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. He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit . 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. To become a subscriber to Slightly Foxed: The Real Reader’s Quarterly Magazine, please visit our subscriptions page.

This amount includes seller specified domestic postage charges as well as applicable international postage, dispatch, and other fees. Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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. 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! John Lewis-Stempel's story of a year on his smallholding in the Charente is warm and vivid and beautiful.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. He guides us with gusto around his tiny potager, his five-strong herd of Ouessant sheep with their coveted wool, his water lilies. 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. You can unsubscribe from our list at any point by changing your preferences, or contacting us directly. 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 .

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, Lewis-Stempel fell in love with the French countryside, from the wild boar that trot past the kitchen window to the glow-worms and citronella candles that flicker in the evening garden.Lewis-Stempel is a one-man advertisement for agricultural viability and ecological sensitivity, and an upholder of local uniqueness. He plants his toes in the French earth and turns his lyrical gaze on the land, the people, the deep community spirit.

Good detail on the wildlife, farming and village life here in Charente but John's aim to live as a rural peasant is not supported by 100s of euros spent on exotic lillies, rare sheep and automatic oil pressing machines etc. Finance is provided by PayPal Credit (a trading name of PayPal UK Ltd, Whittaker House, Whittaker Avenue, Richmond-Upon-Thames, Surrey, United Kingdom, TW9 1EH).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.