"Buying a Piece of Paris," Ellie Nielsen's account of her quest to find the perfect apartment in the French capital, continues a recent trend in popular travel writing that started with the success of Peter Mayle's books about Provence. This led to the literary subgenre of British expatriates recounting how they bought an old house in the south of France or Italy or Spain and fixed it up.
Made up of equal parts of love letters to the adopted country, rueful memoirs and mildly patronizing descriptions of the locals, these travelogues offered lightweight reading for people who couldn't afford European retreats of their own. Now that Provence, Tuscany and Majorca have been pretty well covered, expat writers have turned to their quests to live in the most civilized of cities, Paris.
