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! 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. 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. 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 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.Good-humoured, unpretentious and a bit eccentric, it's more like having a well-read friend than a subscription to a literary review. 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).

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