Exploring Top Books of Shelfari

Living Well Is the Best Revenge (Modern Library)

Living Well Is the Best Revenge (Modern Library)

by Calvin Tomkins

In this enchanting memoir, New Yorker writer Calvin Tomkins re-creates the privileged world of Gerald and Sara Murphy, two American originals who found themselves at the center of a charmed circle of artists and expatriate writers in France in the 1920s. Their home in Antibes, Villa America, served as a gathering place for Picasso and Léger as well as Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who used the glamorous couple as... (more)

Everybody Was So Young : Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story

Everybody Was So Young : Gerald and Sara Murphy, a Lost Generation Love Story

by Amanda Vaill

Gifted artist Gerald Murphy and his elegant wife, Sara, were icons of the most enchanting period of our time; handsome, talented, and wealthy expatriate Americans, they were at the very center of the literary scene in Paris in the 1920s. In Everybody Was So Young --one of the best reviewed books of 1995--Amanda Vaill brilliantly portrays both the times in which the Murphys lived and the fascinating friends who... (more)

Eurydice Street: A Place in Athens

by Sofka Zinovieff

Sofka Zinovieff had fallen in love with Greece as a student, but little suspected that years later she would, return for good with an expatriate Greek husband and two young daughters. This book is a wonderfully fresh, funny, and inquiring account of her first year as an Athenian. The whole family have to come to grips with their new life and identities—the children start school and tackle a new language, and... (more)

River Town: Two Years on the Yangtze

by Peter Hessler

A New York Times Notable Book Winner of the Kiriyama Book Prize In the heart of China's Sichuan province, amid the terraced hills of the Yangtze River valley, lies the remote town of Fuling. Like many other small cities in this ever-evolving country, Fuling is heading down a new path of change and growth, which came into remarkably sharp focus when Peter Hessler arrived as a Peace Corps volunteer, marking... (more)

French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France

French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France

by Richard Goodman

Richard Goodman saw the ad in the paper: "SOUTHERN FRANCE: Stone house in Village near Nimes/Avignon/Uzes. 4 BR, 2 baths, fireplace, books, desk, bikes. Perfect for writing, painting, exploring & experiencing la France profonde. $450 mo. plus utilities." And, with his girlfriend, he left New York City to spend a year in Southern France. The village was small-no shops, no gas station, no post office,... (more)

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

Cuba Diaries: An American Housewife in Havana

by Isadora Tattlin

Isadora Tattlin was accustomed to relocating often for her husband’s work. But when he accepted a post in Cuba in the early 1990s, she resolved to keep a detailed diary of her time there, recording her daily experiences as a wife, mother, and foreigner in a land of contraband. The result is a striking, rare glimpse into a tiny country of enormous splendor and squalor. Though the Tattlins are provided with a... (more)

C'est La Vie : An American Woman Begins a New Life in Paris and--Voila!--Becomes Almost French

C'est La Vie : An American Woman Begins a New Life in Paris and--Voila!--Becomes Almost French

by Suzy Gershman

Bestselling writer Suzy Gershman (dubbed "Super Shopper Suzy" by Oprah) is our answer to Peter Mayle in this heartfelt, breezy, and funny story of starting over in Paris. Suzy had always fantasized about moving to Paris with her husband, but when he dies unexpectedly, she decides to fulfill their dream alone. Here she gives a deliciously conversational chronicle of her first year in Paris and of the... (more)

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree

by Chris Stewart

Chris Stewart's "Driving Over Lemons" told the story of his move to a remote mountain farm in Las Alpujarras - an oddball region of Spain, south of Granada. Funny, insightful and real, the book became an international bestseller. "A Parrot in a Pepper Tree", the sequel to "Lemons", follows the lives of Chris, Ana and their daughter, Chloe, as they get to grips with a misanthropic parrot who joins their home,... (more)

As the Romans Do: An American Family's Italian Odyssey

As the Romans Do: An American Family's Italian Odyssey

by Alan Epstein

Rome is a great place to visit -- but imagine the delights of living there. Long in love with the Eternal City, Alan Epstein has been reveling in life as a resident since 1995. In As the Romans Do, he reveals the city and its people in all their facets and contradictions: their gregarious caffé culture, inborn artistic flair, passionate appreciation of good food, instinctive mistrust of technology, showy sex... (more)

Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

Oleander, Jacaranda: A Childhood Perceived

by Penelope Lively

A poignant and bittersweet memoir from the distinguished British fiction writer Penelope Lively, Oleander, Jacaranda evokes the author's unusual childhood growing up English in Egypt during the 1930s and 1940s. Filled with the birds, animals and planetsof the Nile landscape that the author knew as a child, Oleander, Jacaranda follows the young Penelope from a visit to a fellaheen village to an afternoon at... (more)

The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley

The Tuscan Year: Life and Food in an Italian Valley

by Elizabeth Romer

The Tuscan Year recounts the daily life and food preparation of a family living on a farm in Tuscany. Elizabeth Romer chronicles each season’s activities month by month: curing prosciutto and making salame in January, planting and cheesemaking in March, harvesting and threshing corn in July, hunting for wild muchrooms in September, and grape crushing in Ocober. Scattered throughout this lovely calendar are... (more)

Italian Education

by Tim Parks

Tim Parks' first bestseller, Italian Neighbors , chronicled his initiation into Italian society and cultural life. Reviewers everywhere hailed it as a bravissimo performance. Now he turns to his children -- born and bred in Italy -- and their milieu in a small village near Verona. With the splendid eye for detail, character, and intrigue that has brought him acclaim as a novelist, he creates a fascinating... (more)

Elements of Italy

by Lisa St Aubin de Teran

In this outstanding anthology, the author conveys the essence of her adopted country, through a deft presentation of the writings of a stunning variety of writers, a heavenly chorus of Italy's most ardent admirers.

A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece

A House in Corfu: A Family's Sojourn in Greece

by Emma Tennant

This book is the story of Emma Tennant's parent's house, Rovinia, set above the bay in Corfu where legend has it Ulysses was shipwrecked and found by Nausicaa, daughter of King Alcinous. It is also the story of people like Maria, a miraculous cook and the presiding spirit of the house, and her husband, Thodoros, and of the inhabitants of the local village, high on the hill above the bay. Full of color and... (more)

The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France

The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love, and Olive Oil in the South of France

by Carol Drinkwater

When Carol Drinkwater and her fianc&eacute, Michel, are given the opportunity to purchase ten acres of an abandoned olive farm in the South of France, they find the region's splendor impossible to resist. Using their entire savings as a down payment, the couple embark on an adventure that brings them in contact with the charming countryside of Provence, its querulous personalities, petty bureaucracies, and... (more)

A Piano in the Pyrenees

by Tony Hawks

Inspired by breathtaking views and romantic fantasies of finding love in the mountains, Tony Hawks impulsively buys an idyllic house in the French Pyrenees. And here, he imagines, he will finally fulfill his childhood fantasy of mastering the piano, all the while overlooking spectacular views as the troubles of the world pass him by unnoticed. However, Tony’s hopelessly ill-prepared stumbling into the world of... (more)

Houseboat on the Seine

by William Wharton

William Wharton's second memoir and tenth book is a delightful, often hilarious saga of the misadventures of an American artist in Paris dealing with a houseboat that refuses to stay afloat.

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil

Kabul Beauty School: An American Woman Goes Behind the Veil

by Deborah Rodriguez

Soon after the fall of the Taliban, in 2001, Deborah Rodriguez went to Afghanistan as part of a group offering humanitarian aid to this war-torn nation. Surrounded by men and women whose skills–as doctors, nurses, and therapists–seemed eminently more practical than her own, Rodriguez, a hairdresser and mother of two from Michigan, despaired of being of any real use. Yet she soon found she had a gift for... (more)

Family Life (Corgi Book)

by Elisabeth Luard

Food - meals eaten together in many different places and circumstances - is the common thread of this book whose underlying idea is that the family at the table is the source of its strength. The book recounts the Luard family's life in a cork-oak forest in southern Spain, a snow-bound farmhouse in Languedoc or a sheep-farm in Northamptonshire. Containing anecdote, humour and curious food-lore, this book is... (more)

The Rock Pool: A Novel

by Cyril Connolly

A classic novel, first published in 1936, now back in print. In this engaging satire of the British upper class, a smug young literary man from Oxford joins an international group of artists and writers on the French Riviera, intending to study them as if they were aquatic organisms in a pool—with unexpected results.

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