La Vida dulce
Welcome to my
author website
Feel free to browse. I hope you enjoy your visit
Thanks to your support, £1,073.17 has been donated to @RaceagainstDementia in 2024
A Bit About Me
I started on my journey as an author in 2020. Thirteen years earlier, I started a different sort of journey - leaving my job and home in the North of England to renovate a semi-derelict stone farmhouse in Beautiful Green Galicia in northwest Spain with my then partner, and now husband, 'S'.
Between us we have created a beautiful home to live in and we manage to keep ourselves in veg, fruit and nuts year round. We keep rabbits and chickens and live the good life here in Galicia.
I am part cook, part gardener, and part builder's assistant as well as a writer.
My first book Plum, Courgette & Green Bean Tart was launched on July 1st 2020. The Writing Home trilogy chronicles our endeavours to be self-sufficient and create a home for ourselves in this most beautiful part of the country.
Now we have finished our renovations (more or less), we are making the most of our spare time to discover more of this varied and beautiful area, and to discover more of our amazing world. Join me to travel around Galicia and travel around the world in my new travelogue memoir series Travels Around .
​All my books are available in Amazon stores worldwide as eBooks, paperbacks, hardbacks, and FREE with Kindle Unlimited.
My Books
The Writing Home Series
Join me in my writing home series of travelogue memoirs and discover a different Spain in our adopted home here in beautiful green Galicia.
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Our adventures began in 2004 when we set off to walk the Camino de Santiago, and fell in love with the area. Camino – or a peanut butter, marmite & banana butty, is FREE to my subscribers. Click here to join up.
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In 2007 we moved into a semi-derelict stone farmhouse in the Lugo hills. Plum, Courgette & Green Bean Tart – seeking la vida dulce in Galicia, tells the story of our first year battling bats, the erratic Galician weather, and the inevitable Spanish mañana timekeeping, through letters home to my mum in England.
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Christmas in Galicia is an exclusive short story, available only in Mid-winter, of Mum’s first Christmas spent casa nosotros, and a fun-filled two weeks it was! Join my subscriber list to find out when Christmas is coming round again.
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In 2009, not having enough to contend with in a still partly renovated farmhouse, and a weed and mouse infested allotment, we decided to get married in Galicia. Did we succeed against the terrors of Spanish bureaucracy? Read Tomato, Fig & Pumpkin Jelly – wedding bells in Galicia, to find out.
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What do you do when you have almost, but not quite, finished self-renovating one ruin? Buy another of course! At least you do if you are us. Why? Because, after seven years of persuasion, Mum finally agreed to move here to Galicia – if we found her a house. Find out if we get the casita completed on time with the help of our army of ‘workawayers’ and join the fun when Mother makes three in Galicia. Chestnut, Cherry & Kiwi Fruit Sponge – A final year to write home about and Mother makes three in Galicia is the last in the writing home series. It is a bumper read spanning two fun-filled years. Subscribe now to get bonus material and photos.
Oh and do you want to know where my strange titles come from? They are the fruits and vegetables which grew best in each of the years covered in my memoirs. I set myself a task: to make each cover recipe and believe me... some were easier than others!!
You can taste them in the recipe section of my books. Enjoy!
Travels Around Series
Whilst working on my Writing Home series of travelogue memoirs, I was acutely aware that many of the places we have discovered over the years wouldn’t fit into those stories. Thus was born a new book.
Pulpo, Pig & Peppers – travels around Galicia, is part travel guide, mainly travelogue memoir, of places, events and attractions we have visited and enjoyed. But most of all, it is a love letter to our adopted land, and all the beautiful places she hides here.
I invite you to join los tres as we visit some of our favourite places in this wild and unspoilt part of the Iberian Peninsula.
Whether you know the area already, plan to visit sometime, or just enjoy armchair travelling, I hope you will enjoy discovering Galicia with us.
Also available in Large Print
What happens when you take the country souls out of Galicia and throw them on an unsuspecting world?
Lisa and hubby S are leaving their home in the wilds of Galicia in NW Spain. But only temporarily, as they embark on a trip round the world. It’s S’ 70th birthday coming up and Lisa has the perfect holiday planned – until that planning begins to unravel before her eyes.
From the frozen wastes of Japan to the steamy city of Singapore, and from Australia’s outback to the heart of Santiago de Chile, Lisa and husband S travel the world discovering new places, and realising they don’t remember familiar ones, on this trip of a lifetime.
Workawaying as volunteers on three continents, driving across Australia’s notorious Nullarbor Plain and sailing to the end of the world – what could possibly go wrong with such a perfectly planned trip? And will home be best after all, or will Lisa and S be bitten by the travel bug? It doesn’t take long to find out.
A new adventure around the world
Far from putting our intrepid pair off travelling, their unconventional round-the-world tour was such fun that when opportunity knocks, they leave their beloved Galicia, in the remote northwest of Spain, a second time. This time travelling to New Zealand, at the very beginning of a pandemic that was set to rock the world.
Once more using their building skills to Workaway around beautiful North Island, Lisa and S find themselves meeting new friends, and discovering old ones they didn’t know, as serendipity follows them across the globe and back to a much-changed Galicia.
Meanwhile, Mum, Iris, is stranded twelve hundred kilometres from home across closed borders – with no way back.
Can Lisa and S survive three months in one of the severest lockdowns in Europe, rescue Mum, and get Los Tres together again?
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50% of royalties from this book go to charities fighting dementia worldwide.
Please, help us keep our memories alive.
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£1,073.17 has been donated to Race against Dementia (raceagainstdementia.com) in 2024.
THANK YOU!
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What was it like to sail the seven seas with the Merchant Navy in the 60s? Read this coming-of-age memoir with a difference, and find out.
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In 1964, aged just fifteen, Stewart left school and decided to join the Merchant Navy as a lowly Galley Boy. His ambition was to leave home, and to discover the world…in that order. From a drunken sixteenth birthday in Birkenhead to a double eighteenth in the Pacific Ocean, Stewart sailed more than 100,000 nautical miles, working his way up from Galley Boy to Second Cook and Baker, discovering the world, and discovering the joy of free love.
This was the swinging sixties: a time of fun-loving hedonism, permissiveness, and good music. For a young lad from one of England’s northwest mill towns, it was all new – especially the girls.
Lisa, Stewart’s wife and memoir writer of their adventures in beautiful green Galicia, helps Stewart put together his memories, weaving a story of innocence and adventure in a world which no longer exists; and in the making of this memoir, Lisa discovers that sailors really do have a girl in every port!
"I read therefore I am"
Anon
Get In Touch
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