LETTER TO READERS

Dear Reader,

When my family and I embarked on our own 'year in Provence' in the autumn of 2004 I discovered that the well-known seductions of the south of France could come with challenges that went beyond plumbing or the depradations of France Telecom.

It was our fourth stay there, much the longest sojourn, and my own task when we arrived was to sort out what my tenth novel would be.

I had two or three ideas jostling each other. I'd brought a trunk full of books for research purposes. But as we settled in to our villa and routines I learned in cafés and over lunches more than ever before about where we were and what it had been through millennia. We stumbled one day upon a round, ruined medieval watchtower in the middle of nowhere (watching for what?), and walked alone a week later through Celtic ruins smashed flat by Roman catapults two thousand years ago. A different sort of tale started telling itself to me.

I actually resisted, briefly. Veteran novelists aren't supposed to be so much at the mercy of time and place, of impulse, of the view from a terrace down a valley to a bell tower at sunset.

Or are we?

The books that work are rarely those we force into the light. They are the ones that want to emerge, that demand it, actually, pushing everything else out of the way.

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