Uprooting Your Life

A Year in Provence

Peter Mayle · 1989

Mayle and his wife trade England for a four-hundred-year-old farmhouse in the Luberon, and his witty, warm account of the first bewildering year covers everything an uprooting actually involves — bureaucracy, bad weather, and the slow business of being accepted by people who were there first.

Under the Tuscan Sun

Frances Mayes · 1996

Mayes buys and restores an abandoned villa in the Tuscan countryside in her own act of deliberate uprooting, and writes about it with the close attention of a poet rather than a tourist. It is as much about learning to belong somewhere new as it is about the renovation itself.

Driving Over Lemons

Chris Stewart · 1999

Stewart, a former Genesis drummer, buys a remote farm in Andalusia with almost no relevant experience and considerable optimism. His account is funnier and more self-deprecating than most relocation memoirs, refreshingly honest about how much of uprooting your life is simply muddling through.

Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 2017

Lee’s sweeping novel follows one Korean family uprooted to Japan across four generations, tracing how displacement and the longing for home echo long after the generation that actually left. It is a sobering, beautifully written reminder that uprooting is rarely a one-generation event.

Brooklyn

Colm Tóibín · 2009

Eilis leaves Enniscorthy for New York, builds a life she did not expect to want, and then has to choose. Tóibín is exact about the particular grief of emigration: not the drama of leaving but the slow discovery that you now belong incompletely in two places.

Almost French

Sarah Turnbull · 2002

An Australian journalist moves to Paris for a man and spends years working out the rules nobody explains to you. Funny and unsentimental about the loneliness of the first few years abroad, and about the point where the foreign place quietly becomes yours.