[3] Peter Mayle and his wife move to Provence, and are soon met with unexpectedly fierce weather, underground truffle dealers and unruly workers, who work around their normalement schedule.

[4] Meals in Provençal restaurants and work on the Mayles' house, garden and vineyard are features of the book, whose chapters follow the months of the year.

[5] In 1993, the BBC produced a television series based on the book, starring Lindsay Duncan and John Thaw, with appearances from Alfred Molina and James Fleet.

Unlike the book, the programme was not well received by critics and it was later placed at number ten on a Radio Times list of the worst television programmes ever made[6][7] with John Naughton, describing it as a "smugathon ... which achieved the near impossible – creating a John Thaw vehicle nobody liked".

[7] Mayle's memoir provided inspiration for the 2008 satirical novel A Year in the Province by Christopher Marsh in which an Andalusian man persuades his wife and his three daughters to relocate to Belfast.