La Vie: A year in rural France

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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). Most purchases from business sellers are protected by the Consumer Contract Regulations 2013 which give you the right to cancel the purchase within 14 days after the day you receive the item. He is the only person to have won the Wainwright Prize for Nature Writing twice, with Meadowland and Where Poppies Blow . For younger bookworms – and nostalgic older ones too – there’s the Slightly Foxed Cubs series, in which we’ve reissued a number of classic nature and historical novels. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Readers of his many books and his Times nature columns will know how easily Lewis-Stempel's writing marries the lyrical with the descriptive. 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. 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.

Lewis-Stempel is a one-man advertisement for agricultural viability and ecological sensitivity, and an upholder of local uniqueness.There are so many things I enjoyed about this book which provided a glorious armchair excursion to rural life in France.

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. 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's story of a year on his smallholding in the Charente is warm and vivid and beautiful . 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.

The independent-minded quarterly magazine that combines good looks, good writing and a personal approach. 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. He guides us with gusto around his tiny potager, his five-strong herd of Ouessant sheep with their coveted wool, his water lilies. 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). 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.

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. 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. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages. 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. 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.