Le village is a small town near the southernmost tip of france, nudging the border with Spain, between the mountains and the Mediterranean sea. Here, helen Stevenson fell in love with France, the French and one Frenchman in particular.In her seductive, witty and vibrant memoir, Helen writes about life there, not from the perspective of a tourist or an expat, but as someone who is adopted by her neighbours as one of their own. By Stefan, the retired Maoist revolutionary/tennis fanatic, who once drank coffee with Satre and now lives off his lover to show solidarity with the unemployed; by Gigi, the Parisian beauty transplanted south and tanned to perfection by Clinique, who dresses her ex-lovers' girlfriends from the stock of her exquisite boutique; and by Luc, who takes the Englishwoman up to his remote mas, teaches her to ride across the mountains and subsist on boiled rice suppers.Describing the colour and light of the landscape with lyrical intensity, and savouring the languid Mediterranean lifestyle, helen Stevenson lays bare a romantic but ultimately disastrous love affair.This book may start off as an objective guide for tenants arriving at her village house, but it ends as a very personal revelation of how difficult it can be to transplant oneself into someone else's country.