Review
Wadham's elegant, measured and funny book ... penetrating insight and wonderful anecdote and dry observation .. She offers her considerable insights and her anecdotes and, like all critical Francophiles, continues to scratch her head in love and wonder. --Independent
Review
This beautifully clever and intellectually challenging book decodes the French way of life, as opposed to the British way of doing things, and reveals much to like about being us - and being them.
Review
Pithy, larded with anecdote and all perfectly true.
Review
A delightful and illuminating book about France ... Wadham writes well, with effortless wit and keen intelligence, and knows when to draw from Napoleon's private correspondence, or the plays of Victor Hugo, in order to support some well-turned observation or other. The Secret Life of France ought to be this summer's Franco-British success.
Book Description
The publishers of Dark Heart of Italy and Ghosts of Spain comes a candid account of one woman's tumultuous love affair with France, her adoptive land.
Product Description
In this candid and funny account of her escape from English boys and her love affair with a Frenchman, Lucy Wadham describes the mutual bafflement and fascination that characterised both their subsequent marriage and her unfolding relationship with France. Using her own personal experiences over 25 years, Lucy offers a rare, insider's view of a nation that may be deeply incompatible with ours but is also, she thinks, chronically misunderstood.
In The Secret Life of France, Lucy leads us on a journey through the French moral maze, and examines French attitudes to a range of subjects from marriage and adultery to work and race relations. By taking apart the clichés she helps us gain a better understanding of this nearest and most alien of neighbours, and suggests that on some matters we have much to learn from them.
About the Author
Lucy Wadham was born in London and educated at Oxford. She has lived in France for the past 20 years.Her first novel, Lost, was shortlisted for the Macallan Gold Dagger for Fiction. She is also the author of Castro's Dream and Greater Love.
