Showing Signs of the Heart: Love and Death in Languedoc by Christopher Hope

The inveterate popularity of this genre lies in mythologising the Mediterranean idyll as a world where stressed-out urbanites can lose their cares in lazy days and red wine. Like other role-models of its type, "Kissac"--Christopher Hope's home of six years--is peopled by the larger-than-life: a pathological collector of clocks and bones, a woman who believes in her own divinity, an alcoholic donkey.

Where this book transcends the genre, though, is in the playful subversion of the myth. Kissac is filled with immigrants all living the good life. Yet an air of dissatisfaction pervades their idyll, most apparently of all in the story of the British painter who subsists by selling melancholy ex-pats her body and Horlicks-- rekindling those memories of home that all exiles try to erase.

Hope is a sensitive and witty writer whose sentences betray an interest in the emotions above all else. His subtly expressed disdain for our age, with its scientific certainties and slow betrayal of the feelings, saturates these memorable stories of love and death, and the curious symbiosis between the two:

"God is officially dead, and life is run from California. But then I don't care about these things. I care about signs from the heart."

--Toby Green