The Exmoor Files How I Lost a Husband and Found Rural Bliss

This laugh-out-loud book charts columnist Liz Jones' new life in a broken-down old farmhouse in the heart of Exmoor in Somerset with an expanding menagerie of rescued farm animals and horses. Liz leaves behind not only her immaculate townhouse in Islington but also a husband. Her Exmoor farmhouse was once a six-bedroom Victorian country house with original stable block, barn and 46 acres of pasture, woodland, an orchard that has seen better days and two lakes, in the heart of Exmoor National Park. But the house is a wreck, and needs total renovation. The stables, though, are ready to move into, with the addition of rubber flooring, organic bedding and hay bars. Liz starts work on the stables, barn and fields first (they need new gates, fences, general tidying), prepares a large vegetable garden, and then over the winter starts work on the interior of the house.'The Exmoor Files' is a funny, honest, often brutal account of what it is like to start over again, on your own, in a completely different environment. The book chronicles Liz's first year in the countryside. She reflects on the reasons for making this decision: a disastrous marriage, disillusionment with all things urban, with 'having it all', with being a powerhouse magazine columnist whose only concern was whether there was a smudge on her stainless steel work surfaces, or a cat hair on her professionally laundered vintage bed linen. Like a liberated battery hen, Liz hopes to grow new feathers, learn to walk tall, scratch about in the rich, red earth and, finally, live life to the full.