Village to Village

In this witty and entertaining memoir, Alister Kershaw describes the pleasures of his prolonged residence in France - a country of villages - from 1948, when even Paris was a series of villages. In post-war Paris, Kershaw lived a penniless but joyous existence, tramping streets he had long imagined from the poets and novelists he had read. Village to Village captures a Paris long gone but vividly remembered. The author conjures Paris prior to the triumph of the technocrats and town planners, and the major redevelopments that changed the provincial cities for all time. It also traces the authors move into the Berry, two hours south of Paris, where he lives in a hamlet of six houses and finds a rural life amongst a small group of traditional winemakers. What will his neighbours make of this intruder - a writer, a poet, a broadcaster - and an Australian into the bargain?