A Chateau Of One S Own

Sam and Bud intended to move to France and create a simple life with their children. However they bought a 17th century chateau with over thirty rooms. With modest savings, they restored the building and started a bed and breakfast against resistance from the locals. This is a glimpse into what it takes to leave everything behind to pursue a dream.

When a well-to-do extended English family find their perfect escape from the pressures of the city, a 17th Century château awaiting renovation in a quiet corner of rural France, everything is très bon. They are welcomed into the commune, make new friends, and enjoy the peaceful, rustic lifestyle - until a powerful politician with a Machiavellian agenda sets out to ruin them. Against a backdrop of intrigue, blackmail, and skeletons of Nazi collaboration from World War II, the evils of corruption envelop their Gallic dream in Le Château: A Very French Affair. It's both a cautionary tale and a spot-on study of what can happen when friendly, well-meaning outsiders - in this case a clan of Londoners - try to become insiders in a land with a very foreign culture. The author, Nick Hampton, a dual English-Australian national, wrote the novel from a position of great insight: his own home in the south of France.

Devoted explicitly to the examination of Ottoman/Turkish-inspired architecture in Western Europe during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in this study Nebahat Avcioglu rethinks the question of cultural frontiers not as separations but as a rapport of heterogeneities. Reclaiming turquerie as cross-cultural art from the confines of the inconsequential exoticism it is often reduced to, Avcioglu analyses hitherto neglected constructions, and links them to notions of self-representation and politics.

Whiteladies explores the story of two aging sisters, Susan and Augustine Austin, who live in an old house and a former nunnery known as Whiteladies. At the story's beginning, the house belonged to their seriously ill nephew Herbert. Susan remained anxious that, when Herbert dies, the estate will go to a cousin she despises, and she and Augustine will lose their home. The measures she takes to stop that from happening are revealed later in this gripping story.