Driving Over Lemons, A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society, by Chris Stewart

Hurrah! The time has come to review the first book I ever mentioned on this blog. And it's younger siblings, whom it has had to wait for.

Last summer my friend Phoebe rang me while i was in ASDA buying flipflops, and we finalised our plans for a holiday in Spain that August. A few days later I was reading the Sunday Times' 50 top reccommendations for holiday reads, and I noticed that some chap called Chris Stewart had just published his third book about life on his farm in the Andalucian mountains, which is exactly where I was about to go. I took myself off to the library, where this Almond Blossom book wasn't available, but the first one, Driving Over Lemons, certainly was. It's always better to start at the beginning of a trilogy anyway, so that's where I began. In these books Chris Stewart, an eternally optimistic Brit, writes about the new life that he and his family carve out in a ramshackle farm in Spain. I love to read comical anecdotes penned by self-deprecating, humble writers and Stewart is up there with the best of them. I made light work of the first two books, and by the time in was up in the Alpujarras I was keen to take a drive along the scary mountain roads down to his nearest main town, Orgiva, which was not far at all from where we were staying, to get a better picture of the environment he describes. Sadly our plans were scuppered by some undercooked Granadian calamari and I've felt a bit gutted about that ever since. Oh well.

I finally managed to get the third book in February, but somehow I just couldn't settle down to read it until the sun was shining and it was warm enough to sit in the garden! The first two books are more packed with action, comedy and gastronomical descriptions, but it was also interesting to read the most up-to-date anecdotes - it suddenly felt more real than ever. ABAS also features an episode from Stewart's early life as a Spanish farmer which I found especially engaging: in Morrocco on a temporary job he gets taken in by a poor family, who have also adopted a child off the street and a baby who was abandoned in a hospital, and here he sees the incredible generosity that the poor are able to show towards others in their community and to complete strangers.