Peter Fiennes for En Route: A Journey Round France in the Company of Great Writers

This summer, we will be treated to a visit from Peter Fiennes, the critically acclaimed author of A Thing of Beauty and Footnotes. In celebration of his new book, En Route: A Journey Round France in the Company of Great Writers, Peter will take us on the ultimate literary grand tour - without even leaving the bookshop!

'Peter Fiennes's brisk literary travelogue is witty and packed with gossip; it moves at the speed of a TGV, with the elegance of a Citroen DS.' SEBASTIAN FAULKS

Travelling in a loop around France, from Le Havre to Paris, Peter Fiennes explores France's sense of its own people, place and identity through some of its greatest writers and artists. Moving between the centuries, from the Arthurian forests and Neolithic fields of Brittany to the banlieues of Paris, Fiennes follows the threads of history across France. And wonders what is next for this sublime, mysterious and sometimes fractious country.

Fiennes drinks with Sartre and de Beauvoir in the bars of Rouen and Le Havre; follows Edith Wharton's 'Motor-Flight' along the Loire Valley to the home of George Sand; and explores the beaches of the south with Colette and Katherine Mansfield. He lingers near Bordeaux with Francois Mauriac, strolls in the foothills of the Alps with John Berger and follows Colette to the trenches at Verdun, before finally heading to Paris, where he consigns Maupassant to an asylum and Sartre to his grave.

A paean to the glories of French literature, art, landscape, food and wine, En Route is a heartfelt exploration of where the country finds itself after so many centuries at the centre of European life.