A reader's journey along the French Riviera, from Hyeres and Saint-Tropez to the Italian border, introducing the lives and work of writers who passed this way.

The sunlight and calm of the French Riviera have been a magnet for writers since the fourteenth century. The Cote d'Azur has provided the inspiration and setting for some of the greatest literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

From distinguished Nobel laureates to new authors who found their voices there, Ted Jones's encyclopaedic work covers them all: writers such as Graham Greene and W. Somerset Maugham, who spent much of their lives there; F. Scott Fitzgerald and Guy de Maupassant, whose work it dominates.

The book also includes the countless writers who simply lingered there, including Louisa M. Alcott, Hans Christian Anderson, J.G. Ballard, Samuel Beckett, Arnold Bennett, William Boyd, Bertholt Brecht, Anthony Burgess, Albert Camus, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, T.S. Eliot, Ian Fleming, Ernest Hemingway, Aldous Huxley, James Joyce, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, A.A. Milne, Vladimir Nabokov, Dorothy Parker, Sylvia Plath, Jean-Paul Sartre, George Bernard Shaw, Robert Louis Stevenson, Anton Tchekhov, Leo Tolstoy, Evelyn Waugh, H.G. Wells, Oscar Wilde, P.G. Wodehouse, Virginia Woolf and W.B. Yeats - and many others.