1st in series of French Impressions unique Travel books

2nd in series of French Impressions unusual travel books

In 1950, as many families were establishing lives in suburbia, Mary and Frank Littell decided to uproot their young family from the comfort of their home in the United States and move to France for a year. Now, decades later, their son John S. Littell, who was four years old at the time of their French exploration, brings his mother’s journals to life and tells the story of living in the working-class town of Montpellier from her perspective. French Impressions: The Adventures of an American Family chronicles one family’s adventures abroad, as Mary struggles to maintain a home in a new culture and to cook the local cuisine, while Frank traverses to various bars and nightly reads Great Expectations to his toddlers. These often comedic and heartening familial struggles will at once seem familiar and lost to the times gone by.

For fifteen years, humourist, writer, raconteur and generally funny man George East and his wife Donella lived in the remnants of an old water mill in the heart of Normandy's Cherbourg peninsula. The former night club bouncer, radio presenter, seamstress and professional bed tester's accounts of the couple's life and times in and around the tiny village of Nehou have been enjoyed by millions.This is the FOURTH book in the best-selling Mill of the Flea series, continuing the often farcical and always entertaining adventures of the author and his wife as they attempt to make a new life in rural France. In FRENCH FLEA BITES, new characters and bizarre situations encountered by our innocents abroad include a man who believes he died in 1979, a cat who becomes a werewolf at full moon, and a plan to turn a farmyard compost heap into Nehou's answer to the Millennium Dome. Totally unlike any other book in the genre, FRENCH FLEA BITES covers another eventful year for our hero and his wife as they stumble knee-deep through the rice pudding of their lives in darkest rural Normandy and at the Mill of the Flea. This episode introduces another galaxy of weird characters and situations - and a number of distinctly distinctive recipes, such as the favourite dishes of an (alleged) Ancient Egyptian god and his travelling companion! EVERY TYPE and age of reader from the confirmed Francophile (or Francophobe!) to the armchair adventurer...or anyone in search of a rattling good and very funny read will LOVE this book.Funny, clever, often poignant and always hugely entertaining. Above all, so true about life and people anywhere on the planet.As usual, George has given us his beautifully idiosyncratic view of life in rural France. As ever, it is very, very funny and achingly true throughout. For those with the ability to understand that observation is much more important than actuality, this is another masterclass in humanity...

He's back- and this time its really serious! Failed rock legend, pickled onion manufacturer, air hostess and euro-entrepreneur George East takes us through another eventful year of his doomed attempts to make a living out of living in rural France. Fleeing from the Mill of the Flea with creditors in hot pursuit, our hero and his long-suffering wife arrive at a rambling manor-house on the vast and brooding stretches of the Normandy marshlands. The cunning plan is to set up a fox sanctuary, chicken farm and arts & crafts commune for the creatively challenged, but the Easts new home soon reveals its grim secrets. A lifeline is offered by a stranger with a scheme to bring the delights of the Great British Pub to homesick expatriates. The George Inn (Sometimes) will be the first of a chain of hugely successful anglo-pubs stretching from Normandy to Nice and beyond. At least, thats the idea. As the clock ticks towards opening time and final financial meltdown for the ultimate innocent abroad, we encounter another host of improbable-and frankly sometimes unbelievable- characters and situations. The amazing thing is that any of it is true. Will George find fame, fortune and contentment, or has this modern Micawber taken his final drink in the Last Chance Saloon?

This hilarious collection of cautionary tales and anecdotes,discusses all the delights and drawbacks of finding,buying and restoring French property. Significantly subtitled A Year in Purgatory,Home & Dry in France follows the initial adventures of our innocents abroad en route to their 18th-century water mill.

For more than a decade, Inspector Jack Mowgley has been keeping a sort of rough-hewn order at Portsmouth Continental Ferry Port. Critics and those who fell foul of his notions of natural and sometimes rough justice say he regarded the port as his personal fiefdom. They are right. But times have changed, and the Police Force has become a Service. The day that a fast-track and very politically-correct female took over as his boss, The Ferry King knew his days were numbered. He was right.After an investigation, Mowgley is invited to jump before he is pushed and to take early retirement. Now he must start a new life in new surroundings. During a visit to Normandy a decade earlier, his wife had lost her heart to a ruined manor house and also to the man selling it. In the divorce she settled for the town house in Portsmouth and left Mowgley with the ruin in northern France.Now he is homeless and jobless, but has been offered a job by a former French policeman who runs a private detective agency in Northern France.Yann Cornec needs someone like Jack Mowgley to take on the agency's rapidly growing portfolio of cases involving British expatriates. He is looking for someone who speaks the same language as the expats, understands their strange ways, and knows how to handle sometimes difficult people and cases. He thinks he has found the right man in Jack Mowgley. In spite of himself, the former policeman finds himself feeling increasingly at home in a land where things are done so differently. But after a gruesome discovery at his ruined property, he also finds himself involved in a bloody territorial struggle involving drug and people smuggling, murders most foul and general mayhem...

It was from this unique Island city that Richard the Lionheart set out on his Crusades and Horatio Nelson sailed to meet his destiny at the Battle of Trafalgar. More recently, Portsmouth played a key part in the D-Day invasion which turned the tide of World War II. In Just a Pompey Boy, we return to a time when bomb sites were adventure playgrounds, the weekly family bath was taken in a tin tub and a foreign holiday meant a week's B&B on the Isle of Wight. Life could be hard, but, as the author says, offered many compensations that seem missing from today's world. Whatever your age and wherever you live, you will find Just a Pompey Boy a funny, moving and rewarding read.

As Friday 13th looms, so the East's unlucky streak comes to a climax. With them finally on their uppers, an advance offer from a publisher is a welcome relief until they discover they have already spent what is due to come from George's sales, and the bills keep mounting. French Cricket finds the author and his long-suffering wife facing imminent disaster as they struggle to survive at the Mill of the Flea. Something must be done to bring home the bacon, so our hero launches himself into another succession of hare-brained and inevitably doomed money-making schemes - French Cricket' is the fifth book in what has become a cult series, and follows our accident- prone hero through a long summer in Lower Normandy as he encounters an increasingly bizarre collection of characters, situations and events. Distractions from his money-making survival schemes to create ready-pickled eggs and breed boa-constrictors in the Big Pond include regular meetings of the infamous Jolly Boys Club. Members of this select debating society include the allegedly immortal Old Pierrot, who claims to have been on first name terms with William the Conqueror, JayPay (village superchef and entry for the moustache-growing championships of Lower Normandy), and the hypochondriacal Scabby Michel, who has had volumes of medical journals written about his ever-growing collection of exotic illnesses. Elsewhere, there's the invasion of an equally unusual collection of would-be British settlers, whose ranks feature a rollerblading barrister in search of the real world! and a retired 'hand artist' who claims to have been a stunt fingers double for Warren Beatty. Meanwhile, back at the Mill of the Flea, there are the constant confrontations with a tribe of homicidal goldfish and the escape committee in the chicken run, and failed attempts to find a dancing partner for a ballet-loving goose and cure a duck of its fear of water.

1st in series of French Regional Foolproof cookbooks