Search results for ""Author Paula Read""

On the surface a young professional couple, Sarah and Luke craved a different, more self-sufficient life. They traded the comfort of a two-bedroom English cottage for a derelict house in northwest Italy. The Hazelnut Grove explores the joys and demands of daring to live in search of a dream. Sarah and Luke’s chosen life is part fairy tale, part story of courage and self-reliance, as their new neighbour, nicknamed il Cattivo, the nasty one, decides to make war over the desolate hazelnut grove, a two metre strip of land behind their house. Their story is interspersed with anecdotes drawn from the author’s family’s holiday cottage in rural France. As events unfold that might have driven them away, especially Sarah, who does not share Luke’s Italian heritage, a picture emerges not only of how the Italian life has tested Sarah, but also of how she discovered in herself both a grand obstinacy and a respect for the materials and objects of that life. A chunk of rusting metal becomes, in Sarah’s eyes, an artefact with potential. Sarah becomes an artist. Set in Piedmont, renowned for its wine and food, a story of abundance and thriving slowly emerges against the challenges of a menacing neighbour, the deaths of beloved animals and the loneliness of getting to grips with an unfamiliar language and culture. When asked by English friends:‘Would you ever move back home again?’ Luke and Sarah can only answer:‘We are home.’

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Imagine how it would feel to be plucked from your daily life and transported far from home and forced to work in some unknown and terrible place. Imagine being treated with violence, never having enough to eat, living in bestial conditions, and never knowing if you would see your home again. Imagine feeling so completely powerless. This is what happened to young Frenchman Roland Chopard, who was arrested by the German SS during a brutal roundup in the Lot et Garonne region in May 1944, just before D-Day. This was the start of a period of forced labour during which he was moved to different places, including Dachau, BMW’s Eisenach factory and ultimately Buchenwald. Roland survived. Many did not. After his return home in 1945, Roland wrote a compelling account of his experiences. It lay, unread, in the family house in Villeneuve-sur-Lot, until it was found by his son Alex some years after Roland’s death in 2006. This book is based on Roland’s memoir, the family’s own papers, interviews with his daughter Annie, and the memories of others whose relatives were caught in the same roundup as Roland. It is a personal story set in a particular time, nothing more but nothing less.

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