Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia – Special Anniversary Edition (with new chapter 25 years on)

Review When an author is as modest and humorous as this, his story cannot be told too often. -- Elizabeth Buchan ― The TimesExquisite. In Driving Over Lemons the anecdote flourishes once more. -- Penelope Lively ― Daily TelegraphIt is easy to enthuse about the simple pleasures of life, but hard to write about them well. Stewart's gift is to do so with the carefree manner of someone you've just met in a bar, and who is buying the drinks. -- Hugh Thomson ― Independent Product Description A special anniversary edition with an updated chapter set 25 years on by Chris Stewart.Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print. Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies. His story is a classic. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe¨ is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life. The hero of the piece, however, is the farm itself - a patch of mountain studded with olive, almond and lemon groves, sited on the wrong side of a river, with no access road, water supply or electricity. Could life offer much better than that? Book Description Special Anniversary Edition (with new chapter 25 years on) About the Author Chris Stewart shot to fame with Driving Over Lemons (9780956003805) - Sort Of Books' launch title in 1999. Funny, insightful and real, the book told the story of how he bought a peasant farm on the wrong side of the river, with its previous owner still resident. It became an international bestseller and with its sequels - A Parrot in the Pepper Tree and The Almond Blossom Appreciation Society - it has sold more than a million copies in the UK alone.Chris prepared for life on his Spanish mountain farm with jobs of doubtful relevance. He was the original drummer in Genesis (he played on the first album), then joined a circus, learnt how to shear sheep, went to China to write the Rough Guide, gained a pilot's license in Los Angeles, and completed a course in French cooking. Three Ways to Capsize a Boat fills in his lost years as a yacht skipper in the Greek islands.Despite the extraordinary success of his books, Chris, his wife Ana, and their daughter Chloë, continue to live on their farm, with their numerous dogs, cats, chickens, sheep and misanthropic parrot.