In this enchanting European version of A Year by the Sea, an artist recalls her liberating sojourn in France during the sixties—and the friendship that transformed her life.
Marjorie was a young woman from Chicago in the 1960s who shocked her family and fiancé by moving to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. There she fell in love and married Yves, a handsome and volatile French painter. On a trip to Brittany, a rugged area on the northern coast of France, her husband impulsively purchases nearly half of a hamlet, La Salle, and she finds herself renovating a house in this remote village. Surrounded by neighbors who dress only in black, speak patois, and still employ customs and farming methods from the Middle Ages, Marjorie finds a friend in Jeanne, an old and illiterate peasant woman who has three cows to her name and no knowledge of the world outside her village. Their differences are staggering, yet as Marjorie’s marriage unravels they forge a friendship brimming with laughter, wisdom, and an uncommon exchange of customs from vastly different cultures.
A Gift from Brittany is a charming, moving memoir about the grace that can be found through friendship, and finding reserves of strength you never knew you possessed.

In this enchanting European version of A Year by the Sea, an artist recalls her liberating sojourn in France during the sixties—and the friendship that transformed her life.
Marjorie was a young woman from Chicago in the 1960s who shocked her family and fiancé by moving to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. There she fell in love and married Yves, a handsome and volatile French painter. On a trip to Brittany, a rugged area on the northern coast of France, her husband impulsively purchases nearly half of a hamlet, La Salle, and she finds herself renovating a house in this remote village. Surrounded by neighbors who dress only in black, speak patois, and still employ customs and farming methods from the Middle Ages, Marjorie finds a friend in Jeanne, an old and illiterate peasant woman who has three cows to her name and no knowledge of the world outside her village. Their differences are staggering, yet as Marjorie’s marriage unravels they forge a friendship brimming with laughter, wisdom, and an uncommon exchange of customs from vastly different cultures.
A Gift from Brittany is a charming, moving memoir about the grace that can be found through friendship, and finding reserves of strength you never knew you possessed.