Dick Francis: This prolific mystery writer’s home turf is England although he sets his stories both inside and outside the UK.  His gripping, easy-to-read novels carry a surprising authority about one slice of English life in particular: the world of horseracing.  Having been a prize-winning jockey himself, (Francis rode for the Queen and the Queen Mother between 1953 and 1957 and was  the racing correspondent for the London Sunday Express  for 16 years) his mysteries  resound with insider knowledge at a level attained rarely in the annals of  light fiction. If Jane Austen makes me want to be English, Dick Francis makes me regret that I did not grow up in the racing world.  Forfeit and Twice Shy are two of his earliest and best!

Unlike Austen, whose exquisite prose is only to be found in six novels, (leaving her fans hungry for more) Francis has been prolific.  He has not published a new novel since 2000, but sources list thirty-eight novels by Dick Francis.  So if you like him, and have just discovered him, you are nearly “set for life” in books to read.  Check our our great British properties at www.therightvactionrental.com

Ernest Hemingway: The Sun Also Rises not only captures a sense of place (It is set primarily in Paris, in addition to Pamplona and Madrid.) but a particular time as well.  Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley, the main characters, exude the hedonistic, 'too-cool-to-care' ambience that seemed to define the American expatriate experience in the years between World Wars. To this day, many an Americané visitor to Paris seems to have hopes of attaining the romance encapsulated in Hemingway’s fictional crowd of loungers.  When reading The Sun Also Rises, one can almost imagine Hemingway, Henry Miller and Gertrude Stein knocking back drinks at a café in the Latin Quarter, round the corner from the fictional bar haunts of Jake and Lady Brett. Perhaps they meet up, the fictional and historical alike, all sufficiently stewed, to stroll round the corner to the studios of Picasso, and Dali, or drop by the intellectual salons of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone De Beauvoir. Paris, in the years between the World Wars, seemed a mecca for a certain sort of American, searching for a certain sort of something.  While Paris and America have changed, the romance of that era lingers in our minds and no one captures that time better than Hemingway.

Peter Mayle: For any serious Provence junkie, there is simply no substitute for Peter Mayle. To many minds, Provence is perhaps the best example of the France that is not Paris.  It takes itself less seriously, (except for the food and the wine of course) its pace is slower, its demeanor warmer.  Where Paris seems worldly, Provence seems most especially grounded in its own earthy ways. More than that, its unique mixture of tourism and agriculture, modernity and tradition, country ways and sophistication is nearly impossible to capture, unless you go experience it for your self.  Or, unless you are Peter Mayle, who’s gift for entertaining gab, beautifully captures the love of life and down-to-earth qualities of his adopted home.  Of all the regionalist writers, no one “gets” their region better than Mayle and few are as defined by the region as is Mayle.  If you adore this region, reading Mayle is nearly as good as going there.  And reading him while in Provence….well, life simply doesn’t get much better.  He has written many books but none are better than his first A Year in Provence and Toujour Provence.  Don't miss the BBC television dramatization of A Year in Provence, hilariously brought to life by actors John Thaw and Lindsay Duncan, as the hapless Mayles. 

We here at Idyll Untours have fallen in love with similar regions (Andalusia in Spain, Dordogne in France, Umbria in Italy,  the Greek island of Crete and the entire country of Slovenia, just to name a few, are all regions we feel are "undiscovered gems" that American travelers would be sure to fall in love with once they got a glimpse.) and wished with all our might that each wonderful, and unheralded region could find their own patron saint, as Provence found in Peter Mayle.

Italy

E.M.Forster: Literature and popular culture have been very kind to Tuscany in recent decades! Not only did Frances Mayes (see below) shine the spotlight on it with exquisite prose, but Merchant & Ivory’s sumptuous filming of E. M. Forrester’s classic novel, A Room With A View, added to its luster. In my mind, the cinematography of the film has forever immortalized Florence as the most romantic city on the planet. (This is serious heresy for a confirmed Paris fanatic like myself.)  As in The Sun Also Rises, E.M. Forster’s book captures not just the city --  Florence --  but also the expatriates who flock there.  In this case, it is the snobbery and stilted manners of the upper class British tourist doing the Grand Tour that Forster skewers.  The constraints of British upper class life are contrasted beautifully with the liberating pleasures of Tuscany. In this way, Forster gives the reader a pungent whiff of two favorite European narratives: the British (learning to stop being so stuffy), and Italy (schooling its visitors in the pleasures of life.)

Frances Mayes: The minor industry her books about Tuscany have sparked nearly matches the current hub-bub about The DaVinci Code.  Mayes is an extraordinarily talented writer, and her passion for Tuscany is beautifully articulated in Under the Tuscan Sun as well as her other books (Bella Tuscany, In Tuscany, Bringing Tuscany Home)  While the hype surrounding Mayes' work may have been over the top, the books themselves ring true.  Tuscany may not be the sleepy little treasure that she encountered but it is still a wondrous place, whose food, architecture, art and history are every bit as good as before Ms. Mayes helped let half the planet in on the secret.  You just have to make your reservations a little earlier now.  Luckily, the wonderful countryside of Tuscany is a roomy place, with plenty of space for its admirer.

Both Frances Mayes and Peter Mayle are the deans of a entire sub-genre of literature that I have come to depend upon to get me through my long Europe-less winters.  These are books written by English-speaking authors usually enmeshed in renovating some lovable wreck of a property in a non-English speaking country.  Nearly universally, their attempts at attaining a livable residence and becoming part of the local community comprise the plot.  It is a story of which I never tire.  I can entertain myself for months wandering about in a fantasy of moving to _________ (France, Spain, Scotland, Croatia, Santorini, etc.) 

We share with you a random sprinkle of some of our favorites:  

• A Castle in the Backyard: The Dream of a House in France by Betsy Draine, Michael Hinden (Dordogne)
• The Olive Farm : A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France by Carol Drinkwater
• Driving Over Lemons : An Optimist in Spain  by Chris Stewart (Andalusia)
• A Valley in Italy by Lisa St. Aubin de Teran (Umbria)
• Almost French: Love And A New Life In Paris by Sarah Turnbull
• Entre Nous : A Woman's Guide to Finding Her Inner French Girl by Debra Oliver
• The Bells in Their Silence by Michael Gorra (Germany)
• An Innocent, a Broad by Ann Leary (London)