You might well feel tempted to drop this novel into your holiday bag as an engaging poolside read: nice location in rural France; empathetic characters, who are minor academics on a six-month sabbatical; slow pace, as they gradually find their feet in gently exotic location; altogether a kind of second generation Peter Mayle experience, and an ideal distraction for your summer vacation.

But be warned: the quaint paysan characters who minister to the bumbling Brits are not just bereted onion sellers: Jean-Luc contributes his own share of the narrative, which reveals the historical brutalities of the Resistance, a more recent dramatic tragedy in the village, and his own tortured family context. The air of menace grows: what’s the next source of doom? Will it be the murky waters of the swimming pool, the toxic chlorines, the high-voltage electric fence, or the rampaging wild boars?

The trouble is that our English heroes are such losers you could scarcely care less which hazard gets them first, and you are rather hoping that their three precocious children, who hog far too much of the dialogue with their dotingly recorded juvenile exchanges, will succumb simultaneously to all these conspicuous loaded guns.

Which is presumably a central part of Adam Thorpe’s objective: that he is subtly deriding this self-dubbed ‘middle middle’ class English family, who have failed to get their professorships, so are desperate to make a go of it in this fresh and foreign location; they constantly agonise about whether they are behaving in the right way and talking about the right subjects, like the essential nature of history, while helplessly letting themselves down with their socks and sandals and their hybrid vowels, which even the local maire can recognise are not worth a moment of his attention. Their counterparts are the actual owners of the house, who just through being relatively assured in their arty existence, act as a total relief from the wimpishness of the renting visitors. The plot rallies as soon as this couple descend on the house, and the draining air of menace is replaced by a twist of genuine humour.

At which point you sense the author is getting rather tired of his characters, and can’t decide whether to drown or electrocute the whole bunch of them. So he gives you a fair romp through all those alternatives, and virtually leaves you to choose your own ending. It’s not a brilliant way of resolving the loose ends of the plot, and I bet the odd copy of the book might find itself flung into the depths of the holiday pool.