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2000s: A man with a gift for the guitar puts a small French town on the music map
2000s: A man with a gift for the guitar puts a small French town on the music map
Who wants a respectable retirement, anyway? Not Ted Prescott, visitor to Mailliot le Bois, here on an impulsive mission to seek out his past whilst heroically diminishing the sleepy French town’s stocks of red wine.
But once the locals discover Ted’s authentic renditions of regional hero Frédéric Debreu’s songs, life is suddenly not so straightforward for the stage-shy Derbyshire guitar-maker.
Reluctantly persuaded that he might help put their town back on the map, Ted finds himself billed as humble French farm labourer Édouard Prescôte . Nonplussed as his self-conscious performances strike a chord, Ted finds himself drawn into a web of well-intentioned deceit that he finds increasingly hard to unravel.
Haunted by the loss of his missing brother, and with the hopes of an entire community riding on him, it soon becomes clear that there are other, more important things that he hasn’t mentioned to his loved ones…
The author’s love of the music of Georges Brassens and Jake Thackray was the inspiration for The Resurrection of Frédéric Debreu. Frédéric is fictional as is Maillot le bain.
Georges Brassens was a French singer-songwriter and poet. He wrote and sang, with his guitar, more than a hundred of his poems, as well as texts from many others such as Victor Hugo, Paul Verlaine, or Louis Aragon.
John Philip “Jake” Thackray was an English singer-songwriter, poet and journalist. He was best known in the late 1960s/ early 1970s for his topical comedy songs performed on British television.
Author/Guide: Alex Marsh Destination: France Departure Time: 2000s
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