Wednesday 21 October 2009

Pensées Françaises




Time  to introduce La Belle France to these pages. For those who don’t know, Margaret and I have the good fortune to own a small (very small!) house in the rural Vendée. Our year is pleasantly divided between France and the UK, therefore - the best of two worlds. We may get back to France in another blog. The reason for introducing it here, is the picture above, La Tour de L’Octroi, Fontenay-le-Comte. Now Fontenay (our nearest town when in France) is an astonishingly beautiful little Renaissance town of real dignity. L’Octroi (which doesn’t really lean like this) is a minor 19C addition to its architectural gems and sits beside the lovely Vendée river. Very pretty, I hear you comment: and, under your breath, so what?
Well, for the time being, L’Octroi is a bookshop, specialising in second-hand and rare English books and MS and run by the excellent Cid Jackson. Don’t ask why. I don’t know why a 19C monument in the middle of France should be an English bookshop run by a West-Yorkshireman. It just is so. Take my word.
Back to those words: book shop. Now I know that my novel is neither second hand (in spite of Amazon’s peculiar listing of it!) nor rare. But there’s just an outside chance that I might persuade Cid to carry a few copies - just to see if it sells. So how about this for an ironic oddity. My book, which I could not publish in the UK, is published in America. I can’t persuade any S.Yorkshire shops to carry it - but maybe - just maybe - the first shop into which you can walk and buy it will be 600 miles away in mid France.
Funny the way things turn out.

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