Marisa Raoul’s memoir recounts the ten years she spent living and working with her husband in France. With French travel memoirs lining bookshop shelves – such as Ellie Nielsen’s Buying a Piece of Paris (2007), Mark Greenside’s I’ll Never Be French (no matter what I do) and Lucy Knisley’s French Milk (both 2008) and, of course, Peter Mayle’s wildly popular A Year in Provence (1991) – Raoul is treading safe, and commercially viable, waters.

In the early 1990s Raoul meets her future French husband, Jean (to readers’ chagrin, all French words are italicised in Ma Folie Française), while working as an air hostess. Within hours she knows that Jean is the one (‘He literally charmed the pants off me’), and the pair falls rapturously in love. In between their working holidays in the world’s most exotic locales, they move into a ‘one-bedder’ in Manly.