Dear friend, This will be the briefest of Newsletters and will not contain a great deal of news! I am intending to deliver my new novel later today or tomorrow so I am DEEP in the world of my ‘lost domain’. As you can see from the photograph, I have recently returned from a week…
I am writing this from Biarritz, a seaside town originally put on the map as a holiday resort by Napoléon III when he built his beloved Spanish wife, Eugénie de Montijo, a two-storey villa set high on a windy bluff overlooking the town’s grand plage (largest beach). The villa still stands. Now augmented to five…
I am sending this from Rome where I have disappeared to for a few days to escape dogs, sheep (yes!), olive trees and all commitments other than writing. I have found myself a perfectly airy studio in the eaves of a hidden complex in one of the fabulous old ochre-toned Roman streets near the Spanish…
It is a special day today. A Publication Day. Hotel Paradise, my latest story for the Kindle Single store on Amazon, goes live. Hooray. We are all very excited about it. As with The Girl in Room Fourteen, it can be downloaded directly to your Kindle or phone or ipad or even your desktop, I…
It is almost Christmas although I have not yet begun to do very much about it. We are both still hard at work, attempting to complete all our commitments before everyone shuts up shop for two weeks. There is a quite a bit to wrap up after a year that has seen a great deal…
These last few blisteringly hot months have been packed with work. A few journeys undertaken but mostly I have been at my desk at the farm, scribbling away. These are the days when I appreciate how very privileged my life is. I have the liberty to begin as early as I want and to type…
We are at home and the Olive Farm is gearing up for my mother’s 89th birthday this week. I am going out later this morning to order the cake. We have a young couple from the States staying with us. They are on holiday from Morocco. Deep down in the south and close to the…
Around the world in eighty days… well, perhaps not quite around the world but it certainly feel as though I have not stopped travelling since I last wrote a Newsletter in December. Where to begin? Let me start with the US Tour because it has certainly been a highlight of this year so far. I…
It has been a while since I have written a Newsletter and I apologise for that. We have been building a new website and I had no idea how much time or energy this would take. I sincerely hope you will enjoy the results and that, once we have the teething problems dealt with, you…
I know that for those of you in Britain and Ireland, the weather has been lousy and for many in the United States, there have been floods or fires. So, I hope everyone is safe and well. Here, I almost hate to admit it, the weather is quite magnificent, as is the garden. Because we…
And what a spring! Weather patterns everywhere seem a little bizarre, a little extreme, don’t they? Friends tell me that England and Ireland have been experiencing a pre-Easter heat wave and now snow threatens! I have to admit that we have been enjoying well above average temperatures with some days reaching as high as 26/27°…
I am writing this letter from Rome, not from the Olive Farm. A visit to Rome just before Christmas is my idea of joy. Fortunately, thanks to the schedule for The Olive Route films, I have been given the perfect opportunity to indulge my pleasure this month. I arrived two days ago. Once installed at…
Have we celebrated Bastille Day, the fourteenth of July, already? Yes, indeed. We sat out on the terrace, enjoying a late barbecue watching fireworks shooting into the sky from every Provençal village encircling us. The most spectacular, of course, were those down at the coast in Cannes. The year seems to be running ahead of…
Hello! My word, spring is everywhere and I hardly feel the year has begun. Those of you on my Olive Farm Facebook page will know that my feet have barely touched the ground this year. Directly after Christmas, I was in London for the France Show at Earls Court where I met many readers, some…
The holidays of Christmas and the New Year are almost upon us and I am hardly aware of them. Of course, I know these days of rest and merriment are creeping towards me, bringing with them blizzards, sack-loads of fallen snow, shoppers bustling to and fro, office parties, coloured lights in the streets, but such…
It is dark outside. The world is still asleep. Beyond the windows, a terrestrial silence, above which Jupiter hangs like a brilliant bulb in a black sky. For the present, it is a solitary illumination. It is seven am and not an unreasonable hour to be at my desk, but autumn is upon us, the…
Summer is here and I have just arrived back in France after a three-week book tour in Britain and Eire. RETURN TO THE OLIVE FARM has been, as we say in Ireland, launched and I hope that you will be encouraged to rush out to the shops and purchase a copy. The early reviews and…
I have recently returned from a month in Australia and a few days at Tauranga Bay in New Zealand where I was appearing at the bi-annual arts festival there. If you attended either of my Tauranga events, thank you so much for coming. They were terrific and I met so many readers. I felt really…
There are few moments that match the sense of release I feel after my latest book has been delivered and an email comes winging back a few days later from my editor with the message, ‘LOVE it!’ Hooray! My new book is about living off the fruits of the land and the challenges of sustainable…