French Leave

It was when she realised she was spending twelve hours a week and five thousand euro a year commuting to work that Liz Ryan began to question how great life in boom-time Ireland really was – and reached a decision the day an enraged biker hurled a helmet at her windscreen. So she quit her job, sold her house and moved to a remote hamlet in coastal Normandy. Thus begins her French adventure, in which she gets picked up by the police, discovers the mixed pleasures of French homeownership – flooded basements, grim neighbours, surreal phone companies, busybody mayors – and embraces the challenges of creating a new life in a new country. Liz hilariously charts her gradual immersion into village life, the setbacks and the joys, the local political intrigue, the Gallic shrug and that famous French bureaucracy – and paradoxical French attitudes to food, politics, sport, dating, and shopping on the grand scale. But like any expat, even as she revels in new pleasures she...