And as I experienced the splendor of late August in Provence, I relished the experience of rereading Mayle’s colorful descriptions of a year of his own experiences. But I couldn’t help but feel inspired with awe as I witnessed stone villages with earthy pink and lush green valleys extending for miles. Having read A Year in Provence, I had fashioned a mental image of Provence that was surprisingly close to the real thing. In the front of the house grew fig trees that bore fruit so sweet that by journey’s end figs had become a favorite food of mine.

In our backyard, rows of grape vines were weighed down with heavy bunches ready for collection. Though I was only to spend a week, my family and I would rent a car and a house in the countryside.

He was followed over the course of several years by hundreds of others,” the author said in 2010.Anyone who has read Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence will appreciate the anticipation that consumed me when I had the opportunity to spend the last week of August attempting to live the author’s Provencal life in southern France’s Luberon Valley. I invited him in, plied him with wine and signed his book at least twice. “I remember the first fan well – a man in a BMW. Hundreds of fans even sought out his home in Ménerbes. The daily dose of education I was receiving at the hands of the plumber, the farmer next door, the mushroom hunter and the lady with the frustrated donkey was infinitely more fascinating than anything I could invent,” he said.Īlthough A Year in Provence was published with little fanfare, it went on to become one of the most successful travel books of all time, selling more than a million copies in the UK and 6 million internationally. “I found myself completely distracted – much more taken up with the curiosities of life in Provence than with getting down to work on the novel. Speaking to the Guardian 20 years after his breakthrough memoir was first published, Mayle explained how he fell in love with Provence while trying to write a novel.

He also wrote educational books and children’s stories. Mayle’s dozens of books included the best-selling A Year in Provence, a 1989 publication that chronicled his recent move from England to France, and the novel A Good Year, which was made into a film of the same name in 2006, starring Russell Crowe and Marion Cotillard.

Author of a year in provence