SOURCE: A review of Hotel Pastis, in The Times Literary Supplement, No. 4707, June 18, 1993, p. 24.

Below is a negative review of Hotel Pastis.

Peter Mayle is the man who turned his back on Madison Avenue in the mid-1970s and settled in the Lubéron. He locked horns with recalcitrant native stonemasons, electricians and plasterers, and wrote two books based on his experiences, A year in Provence and Toujours Provence, popular derivatives of the Lady Fortescue school of dispatches from the Provençal front. So, few marks for originality there.

And not many for Hotel Pastis either. The principal story, such as it is, concerns Simon Shaw, forty-two, who gives up the chairmanship of his London advertising agency in order to open up a hotel in an abandoned village gendarmerie in the Lubéron. Simon Shaw's masons, electricians and plasterers work on a larger canvas than Peter Mayle's but...