title: Hotel Pastis: A Novel of Provence
author:  Peter Mayle 
description: As fans of A Year in Provence and Toujours Provence may have suspected, Mayle's skills as a writer translate well into fiction. His first novel is as adroit, funny and charming as his previous works, and again it is set in his favorite region of France. Newly divorced, disenchanted and bored with his job as a director of a prestigious British ad agency, Simon Shaw is delighted when beautiful Frenchwoman Nicole Bouvier suggests that he rescue from bankruptcy a half-finished hotel in the drolly named town of Brassiere-les-Deux-Eglises. Taking a huge risk, Simon resigns from his agency and becomes patron of the new establishment in the picturesque Luberon region. In counterpoint, Mayle crosscuts to the escapades of a lovable band of criminals who are conspiring to break into the vault of a bank in the neighboring village of Isle-sur-Sorges. As the threads of the plot begin to converge, Mayle displays his satiric eye for social foibles by skewering advertising execs in England and the U.S.; he is equally adept at evoking typical Provencal villagers. Wickedly sharp and sympathetic at the same time, his characterizations are accurate down to nuances of class differences, voice, accent and vocabulary. The novel is as smooth as a sip of pastis, and one hopes that Mayle will find his segue into fiction equally addictive. 100,000 first printing. <br />Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
zlib_text: ![](Images/image00225.jpeg)
  
  **T** **ENDER IS THE** **N** **IGHT**
  
   **B** **Y** **F** **.** **S** **COTT** **F** **ITZGERALD (1933)**
  
  >  _Already with thee! tender is the night..._  
  >  _... But here there is no light,_  
  >  _Save what from heaven is with the breezes blown_  
  >  _Through verdurous glooms and winding mossy ways._  
  >  _—Ode to a Nightingale_
  
  TO  
  GERALD and SARA  
  MANY FÊTES
  
  BOOK 1
  
  I
  
  On the pleasant shore of the French Riviera, about half way between Marseilles
  and the Italian border, stands a large, proud, rosecolored hotel. Deferential
  palms cool its flushed façade, and before it stretches a short dazzling beach.
  Lately it has become a summer resort of notable and fashionable people; a
  decade ago it was almost deserted after its English clientele went north in
  April. Now, many bungalows cluster near it, but when this story begins only
  the cupolas of a dozen old villas rotted like water lilies among the massed
  pines between Gausse’s Hôtel des Étrangers and Cannes