Rating: 
Summary: Enchanting.
Review: Peter Mayle has managed to make me feel as if I spent "A Year In Provence". I recommend this this to anyone who would like to escape for the day to a new place. You will taste the wine, smell the bread, and join in as Peter and his wife learn the ways of Provence.
Rating:
Summary: Mayle's Book a "Virtual" Experience
Review: Mayle writes so vividly and with such intrinsic humour that I believe *I* have now lived and enjoyed the year in Provence!! After reading the book I feel like I have been on holiday, what great $10 value. Congratulations Peter.
Rating:
Summary: Mayle's most elegantly written book of all!
Review: I read A Year in Provence in a matter of hours one afternoon. Peter Mayle has a writing style all his own and made his book a joy to read. Mayle has the rare talent of storytelling; being able to present his readers with an everyday situation and make it into a witty tale of adventure. A Year in Provence is a book one could read several times and still find it entertaining. I highly recommend this book and it's sequel, Tojours Provence.
Rating:
Summary: Experience Provence
Review: Having lived in Provence myself, reading A Year In Provence took me back there to relive its madness, charm and beauty. The aromas, tastes and characteristics of the place comes alive in this most delightful book
Rating:
Summary: very charming book
Review: After all not every book becomes an A&E 4 our serie. The
TV serie based on this book was good, but does not cover
all the details of the book. This book introduced me to Peter Mayle books.
Rating:
Summary: Provencal Prose at its finest
Review: Ignore all the other reviews telling you that Peter Mayle is a "snob" who belittles the "peasants" living near his home. They obviously haven't gone to this little corner of the world and left the touristy areas like Nice and Cannes. Peter Mayle's Provence is exactly what I found when I recently visited. It is a luxurious, sunny and friendly place, filled with great food and kind people. Most of the "peasants" in Mayle's book are builders helping to reconstruct his newly purchased home. It's absurd to criticize him for describing these men because the book is essentially a running commentary on rebuilding his home over the first year. Sure, some of his accounts of events and people are fictionalized somewhat, but they reek with the genuine charm that I experienced first hand in Provence. His portrayals of the locals are much more than mere amusement. They are an eloquent and entertaining tribute to their grace and character. Through his telling of the Provencal lifestyle, I was for the first time able to truly understand the meaning of a siesta. As an American, it seemed ridiculous to spend three hours of the busiest time of day eating and drinking Pastis. After reading this book and spending a couple weeks in the area, I find myself wishing everyone would slow down and join me for an extended lunch along Wall Street's East river. The only point of criticism I would levy against him is a brief interlude demeaningly and bigotedly describing Little Richard's music as a "great SQUAWK from the jungle". That was the only moment of snobbery I detected and it faded quickly. Pick up this little gem and read it once or twice. You'll want to go visit this little understood spot of earth and you may be surprised at how badly you too will want to stay.
Rating: 
Summary: Armchair travel par excellence.....
Review: Mayle shows us a corner of Provence through his own besotted eyes and what a charming picture he presents! I agree with another reviewer that his charicatures of the locals are just that - one-dimensional snapshots that lack depth and are long on generalizations. But Mayle is showing us life in Provence as he found it, and if he wears blinders that led him to focus on the scenery, ambiance, weather, and most importantly, the food, it's hardly cause for complaint! He brings his wry sense of humor, talent for observation and significant story-telling skills to a number of people, places and situations and in the end creates a marvelously warm and witty portrait of a place he has come to love. He is showing us HIS Provence, and the best recommendation for the book is that it will leave you with a compelling desire to go and see it for yourself. Which is perhaps a downside as well because I understand that his book was so successful and brought such a flood of tourists that he has moved!
Rating:
Summary: Great Armchair Travel to Provence!
Review: One day, having been smitten with Provence, France for a long time, I discovered the Travel Literature section of my local bookstore. I found a book entitled "A Year in Provence" by Peter Mayle. This book chronicles the author and his wife's move from their home in England to Provence, France. The book, broken down by the months of the year, tells us what the Mayles encountered whether it be people, customs, food or weather. The book is quite amusing as Mayle describes the French as well as he and his wife's innocent, naive approach to the Provencial way of life. Throughout the book, Mayle describes delicious foods that only the French could have developed. The description of the food and Provence made me want to travel there! Oh! How I would LOVE to go to France! If you are interested in French food, check out this book! It is a quick read, and very entertaining.
Rating:
Summary: Delightful!
Review: This book was a joy to read. First of all, I found Peter Mayle's writing style to be charming and amiable. While keeping the story light and humorous (the book has many very funny parts) the author gives a reader a chance to learn something new. When he described anything from cuisine to Provence locals I found myself either salivating while reading "food paragraphs" or I felt that I met all the characters myself. That's how good the author is with words. Good book and what a great vacation from all other modern fiction books.
Rating: 
Summary: Mixed feelings about an entertaining book
Review: Nothing would be easier than adding another 5-star review of A YEAR IN PROVENCE. It is a hard book not to like, but seldom have I finished a book with such ambivalent feelings. A classically casual armchair travel book, A YEAR IN PROVENCE goes down easy like a fine wine, requiring nothing of its readers except a brief swirl around the mind before swallowing. The story is light-hearted, the writing breezy and funny, the food delectable, the local citizenry picaresque, the scenery pastoral, the wine earthy, the weather alternately wonderful and dreadful. A year of domestic calamities come and go, resolved with the gravitas of a TV sitcom. All ends well in each episode, with everyone smiling and bellies full.
Peter Mayle's A YEAR IN PROVENCE is filled with amusing anecdotes and gentle humor. He evokes the Provence countryside effectively, particularly the effects of climate and season on local temperaments and pace of life. Yet throughout this book, I repeatedly felt a sense of carefully-disguised, or perhaps inadvertant, distance. Mayle reveals little of himself and even less of his wife, who remains oddly nameless, faceless, and personality-less for the duration of the book.
More disturbing are the locals, the Provencals. Each comes across as something of a caricature, a French version of Normal Rockwell's characters, or maybe a French version of the old comedy show Green Acres. There's Faustin, the tenant farmer, always expecting the worst, and Menicucci, the plumber extraordinaire, bigger than life and full of small philosophies, and Massot, the local crank and German-hater. And Christian the architect, Didier the mason, Ramon the plasterer, and Jean-Pierre the carpet layer. Mayle's world isn't populated by people with lives, just role players in the theater of the author's own life, bit parts to Mayle's Everyman, named according to their professions.
Even the secondary characters are presented this way. The men are all salts of the earth, the women all earth mothers. Every chef and baker is a dedicated but understated master, every craftsman an artist who would rather eat, every English visitor a clown or a boor, every Parisian an effete snob, every St. Tropez beachgoer an SPF-slicked fool. And above it all, mildly bemused, sits Peter Mayle, the only non-Provencal to have discovered the truth about life, olive oil, wine, goat cheese, wine, French bread, wine, mushrooms, truffles, and wine.
A YEAR IN PROVENCE is an upscale, clean-hands-and-shoes view of Provence for readers enthralled by Michelin ratings, truffles, finding the perfect wine for each occasion, or discovering the ultimate olive oil. This is not life in Provence, it's a year's vacation in a French country house with a pool in back and money to spend on whatever moves you.
I finished the book feeling as stuffed full of Provencal food and wine as a local at lunchtime, but I was far less sure I had learned what makes a Provencal tick. Seven lines from the end, Mayle writes: "It had been a self-absorbed year..." I couldn't have summarized the book any better myself.
Three stars for an entertaining but disappointingly superficial book.
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