The Chase [Paperback]

'In 1989, my future husband bought a half-share in an old country house, Le Pirier, near Bergerac. Virtually at the same time, I won an Ian St James Short Story Award. The little man in the yellow La Poste van brought the news of my win just as we were moving into Le Pirier that first summer, with some folding chairs, a couple of loaned camp beds and little else but our enthusiasm. In this way my hopes for a literary career and my love for France were linked from the start.

We tried to spend every Easter and summer break from our teaching work in Oxford at Le Pirier. Several of our friends had moved to France, smitten by manoirs and chateaux and the concept of an idyllic rural future, and we all had our fair share of 'Toujours Pirigord' experiences. French bureaucracy, French artisans, the limited range of French paints at the Brico shop when you were used to B & Q, the necessity of paying for work 'on the black', the threats of the sapeurs-pompiers if you lit a bonfire in your garden - we stored up colourful anecdotes for dinner-parties back in Blighty. Sadly, as the years passed, the French dream grew harder to cling onto. One by one, our friends moved back to England. The reason? Money. Money and the inability for us as holiday-home owners, to visit the Dordogne frequently enough to justify maintaining the house. We were burgled twice - on the first occasion, the thieves took everything; bizarrely, they even unplumbed and removed our kitchen sink! Ultimately, disheartened, we sold up. We miss it still.

The Chase was conceived in Le Pirier; late one night, while slipping into sleep, the germ of the novel came into my mind - a vision of how the story would end. I forced myself to get out of bed, fumble for a notebook, write it down. Thank God.

I composed the novel over the next few years. Much of it was written in France, at my desk in front of the bedroom window, where I could gaze out over our neighbour's vineyard and the wooded hills beyond: a situation conforming to everyone's romanticised notion of the artist at work!'

The Chase is an intriguing and deeply moving story about a couple who move to France to escape memories so terrible that their marriage is falling apart. However, Netty and Gerald Feldwick discover all too soon, as they try to settle in and become influenced by the haunting echoes of age-old violence in their French house, that you can never escape the past. The locations are powerfully depicted, detail and atmosphere are rich and precise and the cast of locals and ex-pats weave a tapestry of humour and tragedy.

Apart from its central theme of the arbitrary nature of destruction, The Chase is a novel which expresses Lorna's love of and fascination with the Pirigord: 'Every holiday was a research trip. I carried a notebook and tape-recorder everywhere. Even now, when I visit France, I'm conditioned to take notes! I wanted to evoke the architecture, gastronomy and immense natural beauty of the location, the powerful thread of history running through it and the long-standing relationship the English have had with that part of France. To read The Chase will be to touch prehistoric rock, to taste rich food and wine, to view the green forests, white limestone and golden buildings, and to be held in suspense as the past stalks and preys upon the present.'

By the end of June they were ready to move in, or at least Gerald was. Netty had grown very fond of the airy, pine-floored room at the Coq d'Or, and the vine trellis outside the window, on which miniature grapes were hanging in pale splendour. She liked Monsieur Quiberon and his wife Isabelle, who were solicitous for her health, saying she was far too pale and lethargic. They gave her frequent glasses of good red wine, to bring colour to her cheeks. She liked the local gutsy Picharmant and the smoothness of Montravel or Saint-Emilion, produced fifty miles away on the rolling terraces halfway to Bordeaux. They plied her with coarse goose pate and crusty bread. They made walnut dressing for salads and poured sweet cold Monbazillac wine, fluid honey, into half-globes of Charentais melon. Eat! they said. Drink! It pleases us. The Pirigord, they said, is life itself. The cradle of man. A festival.