A lively, inspiring account of a New Zealand woman's decision to create a new life in the south of France. Amanda Taylor-Ace's philosophy is 'joie de vivre unlimited' - living life with unlimited joy. So when her 14-year-old son fell in with a bad crowd and her life in Auckland needed a shake-up, she packed their bags and took him to France for a year. My French Affair is the story of how and why she decided to stay. Not content with simply living in France, she decided to renovate two eighteenth-century houses and convert them into guest accommodation. In My French Affair, Amanda describes the trials and tribulations of working with French tradesmen (both good and bad), getting to know the local villagers, hosting guests from around the world, teaching guests to cook in Maison de Maîtresse's kitchen, and her joy in new and old friendships and the daily delights of life in France. With over 30 mouth-watering French recipes to try, My French Affair is a treat for the tastebuds as well as for the soul.

In New Zealand’s France, Dr Alistair Watts investigates the origins of the New Zealand nation state from a fresh perspective — one that moves beyond the traditional bicultural view prevalent in the current New Zealand historiography. That New Zealand became British in the 1840s owes much, Dr Watts contends, to that other great colonial power of the time, France. The rich history of British antagonism towards the French was transported to New Zealand in the 1830s and 1840s as part of the British colonists’ cultural baggage, to be used in creating an old identity in a new land. Even as the British colonists sought a new beginning, this defining anti-French characteristic caused them to override the existing Māori culture with their own constructs of time and place. Leaving their signature names in the cities of Wellington and Nelson and naming their streets after Waterloo and Collingwood, the British colonisers attempted to establish a local antithesis of France through a bucolic Little Britain in the South Pacific. It was this legacy, as much as the assumed bicultural origins of modern New Zealand, that produced a Pacific country that still relies on the symbolism of the Union Jack embedded in the national flag and the totemic constitutional presence of the British Crown to maintain its national identity. This is the story of how this came about.