Melanie crea narrativas con un ingenio agudo y una perspectiva poco convencional, a menudo entrelazando elementos de viajes. Su trabajo, informado por extensas experiencias internacionales, explora las realidades de la vida en el extranjero con un desapego irónico, reconociendo que la verdad puede ser, de hecho, más extraña que la ficción. Escribe con una voz abierta y cautivadora, su estilo se caracteriza por la hábil narración de anécdotas con giros inesperados.
From that fateful day when Melanie cradled her child as he lay dying, repeating to him `Stay with Me, Rhys', to the day in court when his killers were finally sent down, this is a story of a family in trauma, of a community united behind them and of how a notorious local gang who terrorised the neighbourhood was brought to justice.
The woman was one of those irritating expat types who felt she owed it to the world to impart on her all her superior knowledge of life in France. I realised that if I didn't stop her now, she'd be bending my ear all the way to Bergerac. 'Actually,' I said, leaning in toward the woman, 'I'm planning to integrate my way into the boxers of the first good-looking Frenchman I see. Can't think of any better way to learn the language myself. You wouldn't happen to know the French for "fancy a shag?" would you? Voulez-vous coucher avec moi just seems a bit nineteen-seventies these days.' After one particularly bad day at work, advertising executive and confirmed city girl Melanie Jones decides to give up her old life in search of something new and simpler in South West France. With little knowledge of the country, even less of the language and just the memory of a disastrous school French exchange and a few day trips to Calais, she embarks on her adventure with a suitcase full of optimism and not a little bit of naivety. After all, how different can life in France be? After a series of adventures with skirt-ripping tractors, handsome twin farmers, celebrity not-quite-beens, unusual toilets and a bonkers ex-pat community, all topped up, of course, with lashings of rosé, Melanie begins to discover that her new life in France isn't quite what she'd thought it would be.