The Only Gaijin in the Village by Iain Maloney
Could life offer much better than that? One set in Spain among memoirs about living abroad.
#THE ONLY GAIJIN IN THE VILLAGE BY IAIN MALONEY PATCH#
The hero of the piece, however, is the farm itself – a patch of mountain studded with olive, almond and lemon groves, sited on the wrong side of a river, with no access road, water supply or electricity. He meets their neighbours, an engaging mix of farmers, shepherds and New Age travellers, and their daughter Chloe¨ is born, linking them irrevocably to their new life. Misadventures gleefully unfold as Chris discovers that the owner had no intention of leaving. A dreamer and an itinerant sheep shearer, he moves with his wife Ana to a mountain farm in Las Alpujarras, an oddball region in the south of Spain.
He got his tractor, as the book spent a year on the Sunday Times Top 10 charts and went on to sell a million and a half copies.
Ever the optimist, Chris hoped to earn enough money to buy a second-hand tractor for his farm. Over two decades ago we set up Sort of Books to help our friend, the some-time Genesis drummer Chris Stewart, bring his sunlit stories of life on a Spanish mountain farm to print.