Notes from the Cevennes: Half a Lifetime in Provincial France - Adam Thorpe

Adam Thorpe's home for the past 27 years has been an old house in the lower Cevennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France that forms part of the Massif Central. In his writing Thorpe has explored this area, drawing on the legends, history and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. In particular he is interested in how the past leaves impressions - marks - on our landscape and on us.

What do we find in the grass, earth and stone beneath our feet and in the objects around us? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now?

He finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory, finds priest-holes and the graves of two sisters in the garden and excavates the blade of a Catholic dragoon's lance. Then there are the personal fragments that make up a life and a family history, memories dredged up by 'dusty toys, dried-up poster paints, a painted clay lump in the bottom of a box.'

Part celebration of rustic France, part personal memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose demonstrates a wonderful stylist at work