Gully Wells is the daughter of the glamorous, funny, prickly American journalist Dee Wells and the brilliant logical positivist and Oxonian philosopher A.J. Ayer. In The House in France, she recounts events around her return in 2009 to La Migoua, the house in Provence which had belonged to her mother, perched on a hill above Bandol, halfway between Toulon and Marseilles. Beseiged by the rich memories evoked by the house, Wells is taken back to her childhood and the extraordinary, liberated and intellectual world inhabited by her parents, with friends and acquaintances including Bobby Kennedy, Mary Quant, Iris Murdoch, Jonathan Miller, George Melly and Bertrand Russell. From thereon she recounts her development from cautious only child to studious teenager living in the turbulent and vibrant milieu of sixties London; her scholarship to St Hilda`s at Oxford, where she blossomed, studying French history under Theodore Zeldin and falling in love with a fellow student, the velvet and cheesecloth-clad young Martin Amis. Then, as that affair ends, Gully moved on again, exploring love and travel, eventually settling down in New York. This poignant memoir is both unsentimental and witty, a vivid and moving love letter to a beloved mother, and a celebration of family, of growing up and of the spirit of a cherished house.