Where to Start with Peter Mayle: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Peter Mayle — how to approach A Year in Provence, the book that invented a genre, his warmly funny account of abandoning an advertising career to renovate a farmhouse in the Luberon and discover a way of life organised around food. A complete reading guide.
By Natalie Osei
Peter Mayle (1939–2018) was a British advertising copywriter who moved to Provence in 1987 after a career writing copy in New York and London. A Year in Provence, published in 1989 based on letters sent to friends during the first year in his Luberon farmhouse, became an international bestseller and generated both a television adaptation and an entire genre of relocation memoir that continues to produce titles three decades later. Mayle and his wife stayed in Provence for most of the rest of his life, writing fiction set in the region alongside further memoir. None of his subsequent books matched the commercial impact of the first, but several — particularly French Lessons (2001), on the relationship between France and its food — came close to its quality.
Where to Start: A Year in Provence (1989)
The essential Peter Mayle — and the book that proved you could build a genre out of calendar structure, comic tradesmen, and food writing of sufficient quality. A Year in Provence opens in January, the farmhouse barely habitable, the mistral conducting experiments through the gaps in the walls. It ends in December, with the renovation incomplete in several important respects, the craftsmen still promising to return “next week,” and the Mayles more settled in their French life than they had planned to be — and evidently more content.
The renovation comedy is the book’s most famous element, and it earns its reputation. The swimming pool saga — commissioned in spring, promised by July, delivered after the summer had ended — is a set piece of mild English exasperation meeting Southern French indifference to deadline that manages to be genuinely funny while remaining affectionate. Mayle never allows the comedy to become contempt. He likes these people. He finds them maddening in the way you find someone maddening when you have decided to stay.
The food writing is the book’s best section and its lasting achievement. The Tuesday truffle market in Carpentras, attended at 7am in January by men with dogs and a shared understanding that no prices will be discussed until the greetings have been conducted correctly. The boar hunting expedition that reveals itself to be primarily about the lunch that follows. The dinner with a winemaker in the Côtes du Rhône where the first bottle arrives with the cheese. These passages do not merely describe food — they describe a civilisation that has organised its daily life around the question of how to eat well, and Mayle’s English perspective (politely envious, occasionally bewildered) illuminates that civilisation precisely because it comes from outside it.
The seasonal structure is Mayle’s best formal decision. A year is long enough to watch the Luberon change completely — the markets, the pace, the quality of the light, the social life — and organised by month rather than chapter, the book has an organic rhythm that feels less like craft than simply following the calendar. By the time December arrives, readers feel as settled as the Mayles. The farmhouse is not finished, but the life is.
Reading Peter Mayle
A Year in Provence is Mayle’s essential and most widely read book. Toujours Provence (1991) is the natural companion, continuing the chronicle with diminishing freshness but intact warmth. Readers who enjoy his comic voice in a fictional frame should try A Good Year (2004), which was adapted into a Ridley Scott film.
For the full Peter Mayle bibliography, reviews, and biography, visit the Peter Mayle author page on Editors Reads.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Where should I start with Peter Mayle?
A Year in Provence (1989) is Mayle's essential book — the memoir that launched an entire subgenre of relocate-and-renovate travel writing. Mayle was an advertising copywriter in his fifties when he and his wife bought a two-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Luberon region of southern France and spent a year renovating it. The book chronicles that year month by month: the unpredictable tradesmen, the extraordinary markets and food, the mistral wind testing the farmhouse's structural integrity, and a way of life entirely organised around eating well. Mayle's comedy is warm and self-deprecating rather than cruel, and his food writing is among the best in English.
What is A Year in Provence about?
A Year in Provence is about the gap between the Provence of the imagination — sun-drenched, leisurely, fragrant — and the Provence of daily life, which is also sun-drenched and leisurely but considerably more demanding. Mayle's renovation is the comic spine: a parade of charming craftsmen who are entirely untroubled by the concept of an agreed schedule, a swimming pool begun in spring and completed after the swimming season ends, a roof that develops opinions about rain. The food chapters are the book's finest passages — truffle markets, boar hunting expeditions that exist primarily as a framework for multi-course meals, a dinner with local winemakers that reveals a different relationship to time and pleasure.
Why did A Year in Provence become such a cultural phenomenon?
The book arrived in 1989 at a moment when a generation of office workers was beginning to articulate a specific discontent: the sense that the life being lived was not the life intended. Mayle provided a template — sell the London career, buy a farmhouse in the south of France, repair the roof — that was concrete enough to dream about while being honest enough about its difficulties to read as genuine memoir rather than fantasy. The combination of practical detail (tradesmen, expenses, language problems) and genuine rapture (the food, the light, the pace) made the template credible. The imitators that followed were many and mostly lesser; the original remains the best.
What should I read after A Year in Provence?
After A Year in Provence, Mayle's sequel Toujours Provence (1991) continues the story with comparable warmth and slightly diminishing freshness. For the same sun-and-renovation template in Tuscany, Frances Mayes's Under the Tuscan Sun covers similar territory in a more lyrical register. For better food writing set in France, Julia Child's My Life in France is the essential companion — Child's passion for French cooking and her warmth as a narrator make it the best non-fiction book about France in English. M.F.K. Fisher's The Art of Eating provides the deepest engagement with what French food culture actually means.
