How Blue Is My Valley
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Narrated by:
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Jan Cramer
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By:
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Jean Gill
About this listen
The true scents of Provence? Lavender, thyme, and septic tank.
There are hundreds of interesting things you can do in a bath, but washing dishes is not one of them, nor is it what writer Jean Gill had in mind when she swapped her Welsh Valley for a French one.
Keen to move out of the elephant's stomach, that stew of gray mists called weather in Wales, she offered her swimming certificate to a bemused Provençale estate agent and bought a house with good stars and its own spring water. Or, rather, as it turns out, a neighbor's spring water that is the only supply to the kitchen, which, according to the nice men from the Water Board, is emptying its dirty water directly and illegally onto the main road.... And there's worse....
But how can you resist a village called Dieulefit - "God created it" - the village "where everyone belongs"?
Discover the real Provence in good company.
©2008 Jean Gill (P)2015 Jean GillListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
It's exhausting being Irish. The constant self-flagellation is enough to put anybody off their breakfast. Why are we so hard on ourselves? Is it the postcolonial overhang following centuries of oppression at the hands of a litany of foreign invaders? Or is it collective guilt for sending Westlife out into the wider world? In Surviving Ireland, acclaimed comedy writer Colm Tobin takes the listener by the hand for a satirical romp through modern Irish life.
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very fun
- By Rick on 06-12-19
By: Colm Tobin
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Almost French
- By: Sarah Turnbull
- Narrated by: Caroline Lee
- Length: 11 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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After backpacking her way around Europe journalist Sarah Turnbull is ready to embark on one last adventure before heading home to Sydney. A chance meeting with a charming Frenchman in Bucharest changes her travel plans forever. Acting on impulse, she agrees to visit Fredric in Paris for a week. Put a very French Frenchman together with a strong-willed Australian girl and the result is some spectacular - and often hilarious - cultural clashes.
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Almost Terrific
- By Elizabeth on 02-05-13
By: Sarah Turnbull
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Death in Provence: A Novel
- Penelope Kite, Book 1
- By: Serena Kent
- Narrated by: Antonia Beamish
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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It’s love at first sight when Penelope Kite sees Le Chant d’Eau - The Song of Water - the stone farmhouse tucked high in the hills above the Luberon valley. For years, Penelope put her unfaithful ex-husband and her ungrateful stepchildren first. Now, she’s going to start living for herself. Though her dream house needs major renovations, Penelope impulsively buys the property and moves to St. Merlot. But Penelope’s daydreams of an adventurous life in Provence didn’t include finding a corpse floating face down in her swimming pool.
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Too Laconic
- By AB on 04-13-19
By: Serena Kent
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Putney
- A Novel
- By: Sofka Zinovieff
- Narrated by: Michelle Ford
- Length: 11 hrs and 49 mins
- Unabridged
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In the spirit of Zoë Heller’s Notes on a Scandal and Tom Perrotta’s Mrs. Fletcher, an explosive and thought-provoking novel about the far-reaching repercussions of an illicit relationship between a young girl and a man 20 years her senior. Masterfully told from three diverse viewpoints - victim, perpetrator, and witness - Putney is a subtle and enormously powerful novel about consent, agency, and what we tell ourselves to justify what we do, and what others do to us.
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One of the greatest stories of all time!
- By Valarie on 06-17-20
By: Sofka Zinovieff
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My Twenty-Five Years in Provence
- Reflections on Then and Now
- By: Peter Mayle
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 4 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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A celebration of 25 years of Provençal living - of lessons learned and changes observed - with his final book, Peter Mayle has crafted a lasting love letter to his adopted home, marked by his signature warmth, wit, and humor.
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The narrator ruins it for me.
- By Flossiesmommy on 07-05-18
By: Peter Mayle
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Bruno's Challenge
- And Other Stories of the French Countryside
- By: Martin Walker
- Narrated by: Robert Ian Mackenzie
- Length: 8 hrs and 3 mins
- Unabridged
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Martin Walker presents his first collection of Bruno stories featuring all the familiar characters from the novels, the glories of the Périgord, and ample helpings of food and wine.
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Outtakes and Ephemera
- By SW Clemens on 03-23-22
By: Martin Walker
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The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 3/4
- Adrian Mole, Book 1
- By: Sue Townsend
- Narrated by: Isaac Rouse
- Length: 4 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Meet Adrian Mole, a hapless teenager providing an unabashed, pimples-and-all glimpse into adolescent life. Writing candidly about his parents' marital troubles, the dog, his life as a tortured poet and 'misunderstood intellectual', Adrian's painfully honest diary is still hilarious and compelling thirty years after it first appeared.
By: Sue Townsend
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The Electricity of Every Living Thing
- A Woman's Walk in the Wild to Find Her Way Home
- By: Katherine May
- Narrated by: Katherine May
- Length: 8 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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In anticipation of her 38th birthday, Katherine May set out to walk the 630-mile South West Coast Path. She wanted time alone, in nature, to understand why she had stopped coping with everyday life; why motherhood had been so overwhelming and isolating; and why the world felt full of expectations she couldn't meet. She was also reeling from a chance encounter with a voice on the radio that sparked her realisation that she might be autistic.
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Perfect!!!
- By Amazon Customer on 10-20-22
By: Katherine May
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Wait for Me!
- Memoirs
- By: Deborah Mitford Duchess of Devonshire
- Narrated by: Anne Flosnik
- Length: 14 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Deborah Mitford, Duchess of Devonshire, is the youngest of the famously witty brood that includes the writers Jessica and Nancy, who wrote when Deborah was born, "How disgusting of the poor darling to go and be a girl." Deborah's effervescent memoir chronicles her remarkable life, from an eccentric but happy childhood in the Oxfordshire countryside, to tea with Adolf Hitler and her controversially political sister Unity in 1937, to her marriage to the second son of the Duke of Devonshire.
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The last of the Mitford Sisters
- By Irene on 01-11-11
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Pearl in a Cage
- By: Joy Dettman
- Narrated by: Deidre Rubenstein
- Length: 20 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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On a balmy midsummer's evening in 1923, a young woman - foreign, dishevelled and heavily pregnant - is found unconscious just off the railway tracks in the tiny logging community of Woody Creek. The town midwife, Gertrude Foote, is roused from her bed when the woman is brought to her door. Try as she might, Gertrude is unable to save her, but the baby lives.
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Pearl in a Cage
- By Verita on 06-16-17
By: Joy Dettman
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The Bone Clocks
- By: David Mitchell
- Narrated by: Jessica Ball, Leon Williams, Colin Mace, and others
- Length: 24 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Following a scalding row with her mother, 15-year-old Holly Sykes slams the door on her old life. But Holly is no typical teenage runaway: A sensitive child once contacted by voices she knew only as "the radio people," Holly is a lightning rod for psychic phenomena. Now, as she wanders deeper into the English countryside, visions and coincidences reorder her reality until they assume the aura of a nightmare brought to life.
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Not Short Listed, This Time
- By Mel on 09-23-14
By: David Mitchell
What listeners say about How Blue Is My Valley
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- MolllyT
- 08-25-18
What fun!
: humor, france, wales, rural, laugh-out-loud
Aside from the fact that this is about a work life in Wales and a retirement to France, it resonates well with moving from suburbs to a farm in rural Wisconsin. Or maybe Australia. Certainly the cultural differences and language learning and refining are quite specific and enjoyable to learn about in such a fun read, but learning to live rural does sound incredibly similar! Her sense of humor is contagious and delightful.
If, like me, you have no French nor Welsh and find the need to pronounce daunting, I highly recommend the audio performed by Jan Cramer who is fantastic!
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