South from Granada
By Gerald Brenan
Cover painting by Augustus John
Penguin edition 1963 (Hamish Hamilton hardback 1957)

South from Granada is a gem, the most perfect book by England’s greatest Hispanist and one of the supreme prose stylists of the 20th century. It is also the ancestor of all those books written by northern Europeans or North Americans about escaping to a rural Mediterranean idyll – books such as A Year in Provence, Under the Tuscan Sun, or Driving over Lemons (also set in the Alpujarras in Spain).