Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #86687 in Books
• Published on: 2007-03-05
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 320 pages

The Mirror
`A beautifully written and highly entertaining account of the upside of downshifting.'

The Daily Mirror, April 2007
"A beautifully written and highly entertaining account of the
upside of downshifting."

Suite 101 website, June 2007
"Anna brings a fresh eye to the genre... you root for her as she
makes her arduous commuting work"

Customer Reviews

I laughed so loud by the pool other people kept staring at me...
I'm a huge fan of Chris Stewart's "Driving Over Lemons" series and so I picked this up hoping it might be something along the same lines - a nice gentle read for my recent holiday. Well it was and it wasn't. The similarities between the beautifully drawn rural settings were inescapable, but this book actually made me laugh out loud - eliciting some very strange looks from the people sitting on the sun loungers around me. If you really want to escape the stresses of life in the UK I can't recommend it highly enough - even if you are never going to move abroad, this little slice of Spanish paradise is enough to make you feel refreshed and ready to do battle with real life once again.

My Easter Holiday Book
Always on the lookout for something to take on holiday, I came across this in Waterstone's, loved the cover and opened it up for a sneak peek. I was hooked after the first page, bought it there and then, and have already got through nearly half of the book and I haven't even boarded the plane!

It keeps getting better, the writing style never fails to impress, there's humour by the bucketload, but most importantly this book works on both a very light hearted level and a far deeper and richer one too. So, any travellers or holidaymakers out there, or anyone just looking for a really well written and thoroughly excellent book, this is a must have, 6 stars if they had it.

An Inspiration for The Hesitant Dreamer
Regular commuting between London and Mallorca? This seems like a strangely masochistic way of life to a homebody country lad like me, whose knowledge of any form of commuting to work amounts to little more than my experience of having shared in the travelling tribulations of Neil Armstrong and Marco Polo. So, the more I got into this slickly-written book, the more I found myself willing Anna Nicholas to turn her back on the 'torture' of flying back and forth between bustling Mayfair and her idyllic mountain retreat, and to make the big break to the full-time 'vida buena' of rural Mallorca once and for all. But easier said than done ... I know!

Her account of how she copes with her double life, including her efforts to overcome a dread of flying and her mischievous pokes at the superficialities of London's PR business, makes for highly entertaining and amusing reading. This book will ring all the right bells for those whose lives are dominated by the routine of crowding into trains, buses and tubes at both ends of every working day. I fancy that most of them will dream of swapping Anna's 'torture' for theirs, but how many would actually take the plunge, even if they could?

Anna Nicholas did, but will she eventually plump for smelling the Mallorcan roses on a permanent basis? Maybe her next book (and I suspect there will be one!) will provide the answer. I look forward to reading all about it when the time comes.