Clara’s Verdict
John Lewis-Stempel is one of the most accomplished nature and countryside writers working in Britain today, and La Vie represents an interesting divergence: the same attentiveness he brings to the English landscape applied to a year of farming in rural France. The result is warm, evocative, and occasionally quietly contentious — this is not a book for those who prefer their rural idylls uncomplicated. Leighton Pugh’s narration makes every page a pleasure.
About the Audiobook
Lewis-Stempel, long a farmer in England, had grown to miss the landscape of his childhood — the one where turtle doves still purred and nightingales still sang. He wanted self-sufficiency, his own wine, the secrets of truffle farming. So he bought a honey-coloured limestone house in the Charente with bright blue shutters and moved his family into a life as peasant farmers in rural France.
The book follows that first year as a journal: wild boar trotting past the kitchen window at dusk, glow-worms and citronella candles in the summer garden, the particular pleasure of biting the end off a warm baguette collected from the baker’s van, learning to take two hours for lunch without guilt. Lewis-Stempel is alert to the natural world in a way that enriches every page — a walk becomes a catalogue of wildlife, a season becomes a meditation on what it means to live well.
One reviewer quite fairly noted that some of Lewis-Stempel’s expenditures — on exotic lilies, rare sheep, automatic oil-pressing machinery — sit awkwardly alongside his ambition to live as a rural peasant. It is a reasonable observation. This is a wealthy man’s version of simplicity. But his love for the landscape he describes is genuine, and his writing rewards that love with prose of real quality.
The Narration
Leighton Pugh is an excellent match for Lewis-Stempel’s measured, lyrical prose. He brings a quiet authority to the nature passages and warmth to the domestic vignettes — the French countryside as it sounds in his voice is a place you want to spend time. At six hours and four minutes, this is a gentle, unhurried listen entirely in keeping with the book’s own philosophy of slowing down.
What Readers Say
Rated 4.2/5 from 381 Audible UK listeners, La Vie has attracted enthusiastic responses from those who know the Charente or who dream of France. ‘Utterly delightful — brought back lovely memories of our time in France,’ wrote one. Another praised the combination of wildlife observation, farming detail, village life, and recipes. A more critical voice noted that the concept occasionally fails the execution, feeling like a quota book rather than a sustained vision. The majority, however, found Lewis-Stempel’s love for the region contagious and his writing genuinely pleasurable.
Who Should Listen?
Ideal for Francophiles and those who have harboured fantasies of the vie simple in rural France, but also for nature writing enthusiasts who enjoy Lewis-Stempel’s earlier work and wish to follow him somewhere new. Those who have read Gerald Durrell or Peter Mayle and want something more rooted in the landscape than the social comedy will find La Vie a satisfying companion. A wonderful listen for a lazy weekend morning.
Listen to La Vie on Audible UK and spend a year in the Charente without leaving home.
