C’est La Folie

This bestselling memoir — a charming rite-of-passage tale about what it is to be a bloke in the 21st century — has been feted as the most entertaining book about the British experience in France since Peter Mayle’s A Year in Provence. It continues to delight readers, seven years after it was first published.

Written with novelistic flair and constructed with an ironic nod to Greek hero myth, C’est La Folie tells the true story of a jaded townie, fearful of Abroad and almost entirely ignorant about animals and plants, who gives up a successful media career to attempt to learn how to be a solitary peasant in the depths of rural France, accompanied only by a cat and a vintage aeroplane. This launches an adventure which will come full circle in the book’s sequel, Je t’aime à La Folie.

What do you do if you reach your thirties and still don’t feel grown-up?

Why fritter away your life in front of a computer when you could be wielding manly power-tools?

How do you learn to be a hero if you suspect you may be a wimp?

These and other pressing questions are what drive Michael Wright to give up his comfortable South London existence and set out, with just his long-suffering cat for company, for La Folie – a dilapidated fifteenth-century farmhouse in need of love and renovation in the heart of rural France.

Inspired by his much-loved newspaper column, C’est La Folie is the gloriously entertaining account of his struggle to make the transition from chattering townie to solitary paysan at one with the livestock, the locals and the landscape of his adopted home.

Witty and winningly honest, this tale of a new life abroad with a cat, a piano and an aeroplane is as much an elegy for rural France as a hymn to the simple pleasures of being alive.

Reviews

“What elevates this book… is Wright’s gentle humour and his ability to create a vivid impression of his literal and emotional journey… with such wit and perception” (SUNDAY TELEGRAPH)

“Hilarious and evocative… Michael Wright’s book provides the most startlingly honest answer to the question of “can you live your dreams or do they inevitably turn into nightmares?” (Dr Raj Persaud)

“Wright captures the fun of the countryside perfectly” (THE SUNDAY TIMES)