The Stopping Places by Damian Le Bas (Chatto & Windus), which I mentioned recently, was reviewed last weekend in The Observer by Tim Adams, who thought it a “lyrical, keenly researched… journey in search of authenticity”. Adams’s piece is now online. The Observer also had a review by Kate Kellaway of Notes from the Cevennes: Half a Lifetime in Provincial France by Adam Thorpe (Bloomsbury Continuum), who moved with his family to France 25 years ago and has written about it in columns for the TLS. Kellaway says it is an “affectionate, appreciative and perceptive” memoir, but one that “serves as a corrective to unchecked dreams of living in France”.