France, Graham Robb
France, Graham Robb
List: $29.99 | Sale: $21.00
Club: $14.99

France
An Adventure History

Author: Graham Robb

Narrator: Tom Lawrence

Unabridged: 17 hr 1 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 07/26/2022


Synopsis

Beginning with the Roman army's first recorded encounter with the Gauls and ending in the era of Emmanuel Macron, France takes listeners on an endlessly entertaining journey through French history. Frequently hilarious, always surprising, Graham Robb's France combines the stylistic versatility of a novelist with the deep understanding of a scholar.

Robb's own adventures and discoveries while living, working, and traveling in France connect this tour through space and time with on-the-ground experience. There are scenes of wars and revolutions from the plains of Provence to the slums and boulevards of Paris. Robb conveys with wit and precision what it felt like to look over the shoulder of a young Louis XIV as he planned the vast garden of Versailles, and the dangerous thrill of having a ringside seat at the French revolution. Some of the protagonists may be familiar, but appear here in a very different light—Caesar, Charlemagne, Louis XIV, Napoleon Bonaparte, General Charles de Gaulle.

This extraordinary narrative is the fruit of decades of research and thirty thousand miles on a self-propelled, two-wheeled time machine (a bicycle). Even seasoned Francophiles will wonder if they really know that terra incognita on the edge of Europe that is currently referred to as "France."

About Graham Robb

Bestselling author Graham Robb was born in Manchester in 1958 and is a former Fellow of Exeter College, Oxford. He is an acclaimed historian and biographer, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and a Chevalier dans l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has won the Whitbread Biography Prize and the Heinemann Award for Victor Hugo, as well as the Ondaatje Prize and Duff Cooper Prize for The Discovery of France. His book Parisians was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller. He lives on the Anglo-Scottish border.


Reviews

*Thanks to netgalley and the publisher for providing an advanced copy in exchange for an honest review* This is a fairly ambitious book, covering a huge amount of time in an attempt to give an impression of the whole history of France as a nation. Each chapter is a self-contained story, there is not......more

Goodreads review by Ian

Although this isn't quite what I was expecting (as with the other Graham Robb book I read), this was a great read. First - don't be put off by the size. The book is huge, too thick to take on public transport. But its a quick read, with a large percentage of the book made up of pictures, an index, a......more

Goodreads review by Tracie

Graham Robb has bicycled thousands of miles over the decades in what is now France, and in this book, he takes readers along. He begins in ancient Gaul with the tribes that fought against Julius Caesar. The tribes had a network of listening posts and traces of ancient life can still be found on low......more

Goodreads review by Mac

Not bad by any means but extremely inconsistently paced. Tough to hold my interest until it got to semi-modern times. Putting the bike on the cover is a bit of a false flag, not much of a travelogue.......more