When Elizabeth Bard followed a handsome Frenchman up the spiral staircase to a love nest in the heart of Paris, they thought they had found their perfect home.

But life had other ideas. Falling in love with a quirky house full of history on a last romantic jaunt before the birth of their first child, Elizabeth and Gwendal decide to move - lock, stock and Le Creuset - to the French countryside; a land of blue skies, lavender fields and peaches that taste like sunshine.

Part memoir, part chocolate-smudged family cookbook, Picnic in Provence is about everything that happens after the happily ever after, and reminds us that life, in and out of the kitchen, is a rendezvous with the unexpected.