Notes from the Cevennes: Half a Lifetime in Provincial France

Adam Thorpe has lived in an old house in the Cévennes for 25 years, writing the Booker Prize-nominated novel Ulverton and exploring the region for his inspiration. In his journal, Notes from the Cévennes, he explores the contrasts of city life in nearby Nîmes and the traces of the past left on the landscape and on us. He finds a fossil imprinted in the stone of his house's front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory, and contemplates the stamp of a chance paw in a fragment of Roman roof-tile. He also ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys in his study door and unwittingly uses the tomb-rail of two sisters buried in the garden as a gazebo. Thorpe's humorous and precise prose shows a wonderful stylist at work, recalling classics such as Robert Louis Stevensons Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 16 May 2019
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Adam Thorpe's home for the past 25 years has been an old house in the Cévennes, a wild range of mountains in southern France. Prior to this, he wrote the novel that would become the Booker Prize-nominated Ulverton, now a Vintage Classic. In more recent writing, Thorpe has explored the Cévennes, drawing on the legends, history, and above all the people of this part of France for his inspiration. In his charming journal, Notes from the Cévennes, Thorpe takes up these themes, writing about his surroundings, the village, and his house at the heart of it, as well as the contrasts of city life in nearby Nîmes. 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? How do they tie us to our forebears? What traces have been left behind and what marks do we leave now? Thorpe finds a fossil imprinted in the single worked stone of his houses front doorstep, explores the attic once used as a silk factory, and contemplates the stamp of a chance paw in a fragment of Roman roof-tile. Elsewhere, he ponders mutilated fleur-de-lys (French royalist symbols) in his study door and unwittingly uses the tomb-rail of two sisters buried in the garden as a gazebo. 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 both rustic and urban France, part memoir, Thorpe's humorous and precise prose shows a wonderful stylist at work, recalling classics such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes.

Weight: 212g
Dimension: 129 x 197 x 16 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472966315