A Farmhouse in France by Rachael Lucas #virtualbooktour @rachaellucas @randomthingstours #authorinterview

 

When Daisy Lewis inherits a crumbling farmhouse in rural France from the father who never knew she existed, she expects nothing more than paperwork and problems. What she finds instead is an overgrown orchard, a village full of people who knew her father better than she did, and Patrick - an infuriatingly handsome neighbouring farmer, who definitely doesn’t speak English… until he does.

Daisy’s life has been swallowed up with trying to keep her Yorkshire pub afloat. France was supposed to be a detour - one quick summer trip to sort out the details, sell up, and leave. But life has a way of happening when you’re busy making other plans…

A heartwarming, sun-filled later in life escape - full of romance, second chances and a setting you'll fall in love with!

First in a brand new series set in the heart of France, by the internationally bestselling author of the much-loved Applemore series.

A Farmhouse in France by Rachael Lucas was published on 3 August 2026. As part of this #RandomThingsTours Virtual Book Tour, I am delighted to welcome the author here to Random Things 
She's kindly answered some questions for us. 

Interview with author Rachael Lucas

The premise of A Farmhouse in France begins with an unexpected inheritance. What first sparked the idea for Daisy's story, and what drew you to set this new series in rural France?

The story idea came from a conversation with a neighbour here in France, who told me about a woman who’d inherited a little house from a father she knew nothing about. It grew in my head, and at the same time I was thinking about how it would feel if – at a certain age – you were given the chance to completely change your life but doing so would mean taking a leap into the unknown. I’m constantly drawn towards the idea of women rediscovering themselves, and it’s a theme that I keep coming back to in my writing.

I fell in love with France when I spent a summer here when I was seventeen, and dreamed of having a little house in the countryside one day. It took more than thirty years but we got there in the end, and the rural landscape is so beautiful that it’s lovely to write about.

Patrick makes quite the first impression - especially with the language twist! How much fun did you have developing the chemistry between Daisy and Patrick, and what makes them a good match despite their differences?

I think they’re both of an age where they know what they don’t want – and maybe needed a little bit of help to realise what they do, and that’s the joy of my job – I get to give them a little shove in the right direction. It’s funny because Patrick is pretty disenchanted and sees rural life as the cause of heartache and problems and meanwhile Daisy is falling in love with the place and seeing all the possibilities that it might offer, and watching as they realise why they feel that way was fun to write.

Your novels are known for creating places readers want to escape to, whether it's a small English village or now the French countryside. How do you go about bringing a setting to life so vividly on the page?

I have no idea! I think I’ve always been – ever since I was a child – a person who notices tiny little details about a place, and the feelings and the smells and the atmosphere of the places I love seem to soak into me so when I’m writing them it’s as if I’m there and I’m just describing how it feels. So when I’m writing about walking the stony track that leads up through the sunflower fields to the village I can close my eyes and feel the sun on my back and the crunch under my feet, and hear the distant hum of a tractor somewhere in the distance… and it just comes out through my fingers!

You've written more than twenty novels across both adult and young adult fiction. Has your writing process changed over the years, or do you still approach a new book in much the same way as when you started?

I am a LOT more disciplined and less chaotic now, which is a relief I think for everyone who lives with me! When I’m writing I have a rule that I have to write my words before I do anything else, and I tell myself that if I do a minimum of 1000 that will do. More often than not I end up writing more. But what hasn’t changed is the way the stories grow in my head – I spend a lot of time with the characters and settings living in my mind before I actually write anything so when I do write it looks like it’s very fast, but there’s often been months of thinking and what-iffing.

Readers often say your characters feel like people they know in real life. How do you build such believable communities, and do any of your characters ever surprise you as you're writing?

They surprise me all the time! It’s one of the most amazing things about writing – in A Farmhouse in France I had no idea that Margot, the older woman who befriends Daisy, was going to be Scottish, nor that she’d grown up in Applemore where my other books were set. It just fell out of my fingers and somehow she was there, fully formed. I feel like there’s a sort of soap opera going on in my head all the time – all the Applemore characters, and all the others I’ve written in the past, are all sort of there in the background doing stuff all the time.

This is the first book in a new series. Without giving too much away, what can readers look forward to as they return to this French village in future books?

The next story is set in the tiny little chateau that’s been renovated by Charlotte, an American woman who arrived in the village a while before Daisy. Her plan is to run retreats there, and the first one she does is a group writing retreat where four women come together for a week that will change all of their lives.

After such a varied career - from the Carnegie-nominated The State of Grace to bestselling feel-good fiction like the Applemore series - what continues to inspire you to sit down and write the next story?

I honestly don’t know! It’s like a compulsion – I keep writing because the stories keep appearing in my head. As I’ve grown older, I’m more interested in the choices people take, and the courage it takes to make leaps into the unknown, and less about straightforward romance stories, and luckily my readers don’t seem to mind. I like to think that I’ll be writing even when I’m in my eighties and beyond!

Rachael Lucas is the author of heartwarming, feel-good women's fiction set in small towns full of characters who feel like friends. She writes about friendship, family, and women in later life discovering happiness - and every story has a sprinkling of sweet romance.

Rachael writes her books at the kitchen table - all four of her children are grown up now, but with some of them still living in the family house and everyone coming and going, there's always something going on. The whole family of six are working together to renovate an old farmhouse in the middle of France, so summers are spent surrounded by sunflowers and pretty Limousin cows!