A Town Like Paris

As lively and winning as Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence and Sarah Turnbull's Almost French, A Town like Paris evokes the beauty, delights, and charms of Paris for an ever-eager audience of armchair travellers

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Fleeing London in search of adventure and determined to sample some of the famed delights of the City of Light, our hero arrives in Paris with only a suitcase and a determination to have the time of his life. He launches himself into la vie parisienne, throws himself at the local female population and quickly discovers his down-home Aussie charm has no currency in France.

Undeterred, he teams up with a bunch of like-minded Australian ex-pats and the ensuing years pass in a blur of bachelor-inspired hedonism. Paris is their playground - and they discover, to their delight - it is a city with a seedy underbelly. As a detached observer who is nevertheless thrust into the daily business of getting by in France, the author is exposed to some of the more unfathomable idiosyncrasies of the French. And just when he thinks Paris has offered him all she has to give, he meets a Paris showgirl - an Australian beauty whose sequin-clad high-kicks are the toast of the Champs Elysees.