Mirabelle Pickers, The

Jacques Reda chooses the height of the plum-picking season to revisit - on an old motorbike - his home town in Lorraine, north-eastern France. The fragrant allure of mirabelles introduces a colourful mix of old acquaintances renewed in these five days and vividly remembered places that have shaped a lifetime's writing. With its reflections, often whimsical, on the passing of the years, and its varied motifs - the plums, the provincial stillness, the toy soldiers of his childhood, 'the astonishing existence of others' first discovered as a love-struck schoolboy - this has few rivals as a portrayal of town life in la France profonde, written with tenderness and humour.