Life in a Postcard: Escape to the French Pyrenees - Softcover

In 1988, journalist Rosemary Bailey and her husband were traveling in the French Pyrenees when they fell in love with, and subsequently bought, a ruined medieval monastery, surrounded by peach orchards and snow–capped peaks. Traces of the monks were everywhere—in the frescoed 13th–century chapel, the buried crypt, and the stone arches of the cloister—and gradually these fragments revealed the spirit of the place. For the next few years, the couple visited Corbiac whenever they could, until in 1997, the Baileys took the plunge and moved there with their young son. With vision and determination, they have restored the monastery to its former glory, testing their relationship and resolve to the limit, and finding inspiration in the small mountain community that welcomed them.

Rosemary Bailey has written two further books about the Pyrenees. The Man who Married a Mountain (Bantam Books 2005) followed the romantic 19th century mountaineer. Sir Henry Russell-Killough, in his quest for the sublime. Her most recent book, Love and War in the Pyrenees, (Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2008) is an investigation of the Second World War, combining her own travels with contemporary interviews, documents andletters, described by the Jewish Chronicle as, 'a quiet triumph of historical reconstruction'. She is a fellow of the Royal Literary Fund and teaches writing for the Arvon Writers' Foundation and runs her own writers' retreats in the Pyrenees. www.rosemarybailey.com