CELIA BRAYFIELD

What do you do when your daughter tells you it's time to leave the nest? Throw the computer into the back of the car, pack your bags and move your entire household, including your cats, to France, naturally. Celia Brayfield tells of her year in "la France profonde", a tiny village in the Bearn, France's answer to Texas and the land of the Three Musketeers. The book gives an insight into a writer's life that's full of funny and perceptive anecdotes - the wildlife in the woodpile, the low-life in the Fandango cafe, why Frenchmen are so sexy, not to mention the portraits of Peter Mayle's children, some of the half-million Brits who are out there living their dreams.

What do you do when the kids you work with have never heard of the Bonzo Dog Doo Dah band, when your marijuana empire has been hijacked and your mates think Lady in Red is a really quite a good song? For Percy George Hodsoll, the answer was easy. You drive your motorbike over the central reservation and go out in a blaze of glory. George had friends - luckier, happier, richer men who got a band together to play classic R & B: Mickey, the star commercials director, has a career on borrowed time; Rhys, the conscientious doctor, is in love with Mickey's wife; four-square, big-hearted Andy, starting over after redundancy, with a dangerously sexy new neighbour; Sam, the egotist supreme, is leaving home for a woman who thinks she's an Egyptian goddess. Without George, life, love and masculinity catch up with the four old friends. It's time to move on, but where to? Start a new life? Fix the old one? Divorce? Suicide? Sex? Prison? Decisions, decisions...Funny, sad, moving, hilarious - a social comedy that touches the heart of modern middle England.