A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle and his wife move into a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Luberon and the book runs month by month through the first year, opening on a New Year's Day lunch. The structure is a calendar, not a plot: January's mistral gives way to spring, then the heat and tourists of summer, then the truffle season and, at the end, an impromptu Christmas dinner.

Most of the year is eaten up by the renovation, which is where the book's real subject sits — a rotating cast of local tradesmen, led by a plumber named Monsieur Menicucci, who all agree to a timetable and then quietly ignore it, always with the same word, normalement, meaning nothing about the schedule is actually normal. Mayle logs the meals in as much detail as the masonry: restaurant lunches, an underground truffle trade, the vines on his own land.

It's a comedy of a foreigner learning to stop expecting things to run on time, told with real affection for the place and no real hardship in it — the Mayles have the money and leisure to wait out every delay. Readers wanting friction or consequence won't find much; readers who want a year in the Luberon, weather and food and workmen included, get exactly that.