2008-05-25 If you read this, then read this.

There's an entire genre of 'moving to the countryside' books, what publishers like to call 'settlement non-fiction'. The books are normally written to commission, it's a genre I had never explored or read before I wrote my own book, which I suppose I have to now admit, belongs in some way to this genre.

This is clearly one, and I haven't read it. So I who I am I to argue with the reviewers, hence the 5 stars.

But if you do read this book, then try A PLACE IN MY COUNTRY: In Search of a Rural Dream.

I'm biased, because I wrote it. Well and widely reviewed, it is sinking like a stone; there you go.

Perhaps the best is The Engima of Arrival by V.S Naipaul, luckily a book I only read after I had finished mine. I think I could have called mine The Enigma or Arrival and should have been tougher about resisting my publisher's insistence on a subtitle, which all these books seem to have.