While Alice is goldleafing the ceiling of her opulent new home in Bristol, her gynaecologist husband announces that he's leaving her for his nursing assistant. Only he's not leaving her - it turns out Alice has to leave him. She's left homeless, heartbroken, the wrong side of forty (well, all right then, fifty) - and with no life skills to speak of. Her children have grown up and they don't need her. No one does, anymore. So Alice goes on holiday, to work out what to do. And discovers Vieilleville, a little town on the Cote d'Azur. In a moment of complete madness she finds herself buying a studio flat in the Maison Puce. How charming, she thinks. A space of my own, a completely new life. But she hasn't banked on several things. French bureaucracy, for one. The expense, two. And her dream of being a lone Brit in a French town is scuppered when she discovers who the other residents of the Maison Puce are...
