Once upon a time, former night club bouncer, seamstress and professional bedtester George East and his wife Donella fled to Normandy to escape their creditors and try to live off their wits in a foreign land.Eventually, the couple arrived at The Mill of the Flea, a long-abandoned water mill on ten acres of fields, woods, ponds, streams and mud in the heart of the Cotentin (Cherbourg) peninsula.

There, the Easts set about restoring the farmhouse and tiny mill cottage - and trying to restore their financial fortunes. Over the coming months and years, the Easts struggled to survive with a series of doomed schemes including bottling the polluted waters of their stream, marketing garlic-flavoured car deodorisers, and even setting up metal-detecting competitions to try and find the long-dead miller’s buried hoard.Having failed at every attempt to make a living at The Mill of the Flea, George East wrote a book as a dire warning to other would-be settlers who dreamed of living the good life in rural France. To the amazement of the author, his wife and (especially!) their bank manager, Home & Dry in France (or A Year in Purgatory) was an instant success.

Now, there are seven books in the series, and millions of people worldwide have followed the hilarious adventures of George and Donella East at the Mill of the Flea. For details of and extracts from all the Mill of the Flea titles, go to Books. For news of the first book in a new series about other regions of France, go to Latest News