Sue Arnold on the charm, or not, of expat tales

Extra Virgin, by Annie Hawes (Chivers, 13hrs, £17.50)

Peter Mayle blazed the trail with his bestseller A Year in Provence about doing up an old farm-house in France. You can see why it was so successful. It had everything the English love best - DIY, dodgy foreigners and the ultimate superiority of the stiff upper lip in the face of every adversity. Now everyone with refurbished houses from Val di Lobos to Vladivostok has had a stab at the white-settler saga.

The latest, Extra Virgin by Annie Hawes, is the story of how she and her sister came across a ruined cottage surrounded by ancient olive trees in Liguria and bought it. It sounds wonderful - and I dare say it is for the author, her sister and their house guests - but I found her account marginally less fascinating than an after-dinner session with someone else's holiday snaps.

It is the author's condescension throughout that rankles, her constant reference to hanky-headed hunters and gatherers (as she calls the men in the village) with their preference for "the aged singlet vest rolled up sausage-wise into a stylish underarm sweatband..." Rula Lenska's exaggeratedly ironic reading doesn't help, nor her perfect pronunciation of the Italian phrases with which the book is peppered. It only adds to the smugness. Is this, I wonder, sour grapes or even sour olives on my part? There's nothing I'd like more than a house in Italy.

A Parrot in the Pepper Tree, by Chris Stewart, (Penguin, 3hrs, £8.99)

What makes Chris Stewart's version of the expat saga so much better than all the others is that when he bought his Spanish farmhouse 12 years ago he wasn't playing at being an Andalusian shepherd: he genuinely became one, and mighty tough going it was, too.

Here's where I beat my breast and confess that because of my aversion to the "innocents abroad" genre, I deliberately avoided listening to Stewart reading his first book Driving Over Lemons on Radio 4. It had terrific reviews and so, deservedly, has this latest, which continues his biography.

Stewart never patronises, he just observes. He's funny, generous and warm and you can hear all this in his voice, especially when he talks about his neighbours as friends, not specimens.