Encore Provence. Peter Mayle. 1999.

Encore Provence continues the account of an Englishman’s experiences in an area of France that has been surprising writers since Tobias Smollett discovered garlic there in the eighteenth century (He hated it.)

As you might expect, there are one or two pauses for refreshment in the course of the book, including a feast in a converted petrol station and a rendezvous at Chez Fonfon in Marseille to meet the veritable bouillabaisse.

But there is life after lunch and the reader will discover, among other curiosities, a school for noses in Haute Provence, a gardener who grows black tomatoes, a crime passionnel perpetrated on an oversexed butcher, a connoisseur of funerals and an assortment of the often eccentric characters who lie in wait in bars and on boules courts.