As a child growing up in Los Angeles, my head was always elsewhere. Whether it was reading about the distant past, dreaming of travelling to other countries or just wandering the deer paths through the hills sourrounding our house, I was always eager to escape from what was, by any standard, a pretty idyllic childhood.

So I set off for Harvard to study English literature, and from then on I kept moving. After graduation, I spent one transformative year teaching in Athens before enduring three purgatorial ones studying law at Duke. Next stop was Conakry, a small dilapidated capital on the West African coast, where I worked for the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees helping to look after the nearly 600,000 Sierra Leoneans and Liberians who had fled to Guinea.

It was a thrilling, exhausting experience, but when my two years were up I moved to London to be with my fiancée Sophia and try my hand at working as a corporate lawyer. When our son Sebastian was born, however, I became a stay-at-home dad, writing during his nap-times and wondering whether or not London was where we wanted our son to grow up.

The answer to that, in the end, was no, so we exchanged our life in London for  a new adventure in the French countryside. We now live in an old farmhouse near Montcabrier, a tiny medieval village in Lot region of southwestern France where we run a small holiday cottage complex. I blog now and then about our life in France, and I’m hard at work on my next novel, which will be based on the events I witnessed in Africa.