The third book in the best-selling MILL OF THE FLEA series, continuing the often farcical and always entertaining adventures of the author and his wife as they attempt to make a new life in rural France.

AS FRIDAY 13th LOOMS, so the East's unlucky streak comes to a climax. With them finally on their uppers, an advance offer from a publisher is a welcome relief until they discover they have already spent what is due to come from George's sales, and the bills keep mounting. FRENCH CRICKET finds the author and his wife facing imminent disaster as they struggle to survive at the Mill of the Flea. Something must be done to bring home the bacon, so our hero launches himself into another succession of hare-brained and inevitably doomed money-making schemes. *** FRENCH CRICKET is the fifth book in...

H&D in France follows George's adventures as he makes every mistake in the book about how and how not to buy a second home across the Channel.Subtitled A Year in Purgatory, the book is much more than a list of all the pitfalls awaiting the innocent abroad: it is an hilarious account of how a couple set out with a dream, which turns into a nightma

It's a mystery to his colleagues how Jack Mowgley reached the rank of Detective Inspector. Or how he came to be in charge of a major intercontinental ferryport. Some reckon the eccentric detective had something juicy on those above him, particularly Chief Superintendent 'Gloria' Mundy. In the first Mowgley Mystery, the resolutely unreconstructed, unredeemable and unapologetically out-of-date policeman learns that a passenger has gone missing on a ferry crossing to Cherbourg. There are no suspicious circumstances, but what appears to be a routine investigation soon develops into a sometimes...

Jack Mowgley is anything but an ordinary copper. For starters, how many police officers have 'ACAB' (All Coppers Are Bastards) tattooed on their knuckles? Or get booze and baccy supplies by smuggling them through the continental ferry port he is supposed to be keeping free of crime? Or dispense sometimes very rough justice without troubling the courts? For these and many other reasons, Inspector John 'Jack' Mowgley is a very different detective. He also finds the rules and requirements of political correctness a closed book. After proving a great disappointment to his wife, a painful divorce...

High summer in the Balkans and George East arrives in Bulgaria to investigate an apparently potty scheme to rescue a dying mountain village. While there, the eccentric travel writer gets to know an array of fascinating locals from the President Putin lookalike and Meerkat soundalike to Mr Rotavator and the man who takes his milk direct from cows. Beyond the village, George discovers much about the little-known country that Bill Bryson described as a 'near-death experience.' The book also contains historical and cultural notes and traditional recipes. During his long summer in Bulgaria, George...

High summer in the Balkans and George East arrives in Bulgaria to investigate an apparently potty scheme to rescue a dying mountain village. While there, the eccentric travel writer gets to know an array of fascinating locals from the President Putin lookalike and Meerkat soundalike to Mr Rotavator and the man who takes his milk direct from cows. Beyond the village, George discovers much about the little-known country that Bill Bryson described as a 'near-death experience.' The book also contains historical and cultural notes and traditional recipes. In his time in Bulgaria, George finds...

It's the dying days of World War Two, and a child is born during a dramatic air raid that badly damages the family home and destroys the midwife's bicycle. At least, that's what George East's mother told him in later years. But then she also claimed that the painting-by-numbers picture of a bunch of sunflowers in the passageway could be a preparatory sketch for the real thing by Vincent Van Gogh. George's beloved but eccentric mother also claimed royal blood and that her ancestor and not Captain Hardy was the sailor Lord Nelson asked for a kiss as he lay dying on board HMS Victory. In Just...

Growing Pains is the second book in a series of memoirs about growing up in the city of Portsmouth after World War Two. We join George in 1954, when Roger Bannister breaks the four-minute mile barrier, meat comes off rationing, and the big musical hits of the year include I saw Mummy kissing Santa Claus by the Beverley Sisters and Norman Wisdom's Don't Laugh at me 'cos I'm a Fool. Times are changing, but the country's leading naval port is still struggling to recover from the death and destruction brought about by wartime bombing.; The story of the pains and pleasures of coming of age in...