The best books about Southern France 📚

Break of Day is a uniquely beautiful book, short and elegant. It's about the solace Colette's house and garden in the South of France provided her after a broken marriage. No truer book has been written about that part of France, and how that land can ravish a visitor. I thought of it often when I was writing my own book. Colette had a house in the hills above St.-Tropez, and she writes about gardening, the movements of the day, her animals, the people who come and go, and the delicious, sensual tastes of that part of the world.… show more.

Laurence Wylie's book is a classic account of a year he and his family spent in the village of Roussillon in the South of France in 1950. This book was the key to understanding my own village. At the time, Roussillon was a place with little indoor plumbing, only two phones, and a once-weekly bus service to Avignon. So, is this simply an antiquated description of a year spent in a tiny French community seventy years ago that no longer exists? No. Laurence Wylie, better than any writer before or since, to my mind, captures the character of people in… show more.

Anyone who wants to read a love story – all of us, surely – has to start with this story of young love set on the coast of the South of France in the early 20th century. Colette’s prose has been well matched by her translators and she’s simply a jewel of a writer and the first woman who really told the truth about love and sexuality.

Most everyone knows Vincent van Gogh spent time in the South of France. Most of us know he was a tortured soul and that he spent time in an asylum in Saint Rémy. And most of us know his wonderful painting, The Starry Night, which was painted in Saint Rémy. Since so much of the exquisite joy of the South of France is visual, who better to represent that visual beauty than Vincent van Gogh, one of the greatest painters to ever put brush to canvas? But what you may not know is that Vincent was one of our… show more.