Peter Mayle

British author who charmed the world with A Year in Provence, his warmly comic memoir about leaving England for the French countryside.

Peter Mayle was a British author who transformed his experience of relocating from England to rural Provence into one of the most beloved memoirs of the late twentieth century. A Year in Provence, published in 1989, recounts the trials and pleasures of his first year in a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Luberon hills, with glorious food, eccentric locals, and the maddening pace of French rural life serving as the backdrop for a warm and witty narrative.

The book became an international phenomenon, selling millions of copies and sparking a wave of emigration to Provence by readers who wanted to follow in Mayle’s sun-drenched footsteps. This created something of a paradox: his loving portrait of an unspoiled region contributed to its discovery and development. Mayle himself eventually moved away to escape the attention, though he later returned to Provence, unable to stay away from the region that had made his name.

He followed A Year in Provence with Toujours Provence and Encore Provence, and later ventured into fiction with a series of comic novels set in France, including Hotel Pastis and the Sam Levitt capers. Whatever the format, Mayle’s writing is characterized by his appetite for sensory pleasure, his affectionate mockery of cultural differences, and his ability to make readers feel they are sitting at a sun-dappled table with a glass of rosé in their hand.