A year after arriving in France, Englishman Paul West is still struggling with some fundamental questions:

What is the best way to scare a gendarme?

Why do French job applicants put sexually transmitted diseases on their CVs?

Why are there no public health warnings on French nudist beaches?

And how do you cope with a plague of courgettes?

Paul also mutates (temporarily) into a Parisian waiter, samples the pleasures of typically French hotel-room afternoons, and on a return visit to the United Kingdom, sees the full horror of a British office party through Parisian eyes. Meanwhile, he continues his search for the perfect French mademoiselle. But will Paul find l''amour eternel, or will it all end in merde?

stephen clarke lives in France. He has experimented with Gauloises, pétanque and suppositories, but only as research for his writing. He likes to spend his free time sitting on café terraces trying to think up a clever answer to the question, 'Did those things in your books really happen?'

His first book, A Year in the Merde, which introduced Paul West, was first self-published in 2004 in Paris where it became a word-of-mouth bestseller, and has now been translated into fourteen languages, including French.