A Season for That

Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

Steve Hoffman

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English

Random House Inc
21 October 2025

Biography: general

In this delightful memoir from a winner of the James Beard M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award, an American food writer moves his family of unlikely expats to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about cooking and winemaking.

In this poignant, delicious memoir, American tax preparer and food writer Steve Hoffman tells the story of how he and his family move to the French countryside, where the locals upend everything he knows about food, wine, and learning how to belong.

Steve Hoffman is a perfectly comfortable middle-aged Minnesotan man who has always been desperately, pretentiously in love with France, more specifically with the idea of France. To follow that love, he and his family move, nearly at random, to the small, rural, scratchy-hot village of Autignac in the south of the country, and he immediately thinks he's made a terrible mistake. Life here is not holding your cigarette chest-high while walking to the cafe and pulling off the trick of pretending to be Parisian, it's getting into fights with your wife because you won't break character and introduce your very American family to the locals, who can smell you and your perfect city-French from a mile away.

But through cooking what the local grocer tells him to cook, he feels more of this place. A neighbor leads him into the world of winemaking, where he learns not as a pedantic oenophile, but bodily, as a grape picker and winemaker's apprentice. Along the way, he lets go of the abstract ideas he'd held about France, discovering instead the beauty of a culture that is one with its landscape, and of becoming one with that culture.

By: Steve Hoffman
Imprint: Random House Inc
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 132mm, Spine: 19mm
Weight: 281g
ISBN: 9780593240304
ISBN 10: 0593240308
Pages: 368
Publication Date: 21 October 2025
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Forthcoming

Steve Hoffman shares one acre on Turtle Lake, in Shoreview, Minnesota, with his family, an ill-behaved puggle, and roughly 80,000 honeybees. He is a writer, tax preparer, and occasional French villager. He is the winner of the M.F.K. Fisher Distinguished Writing Award at the James Beard Awards, as well as an IACP Bert Greene Award for narrative culinary writing and five Association of Food Journalism awards.

Reviews for A Season for That: Lost and Found in the Other Southern France

“This is a beautifully written book, reflective, sometimes ruthlessly so, occasionally sad and often funny. I started reading skeptically and found I could not put it down. One can only hope for a sequel.”—The New York Times, “Best Wine Books of 2024” “This funny, fluidly written memoir . . . sends Hoffman into the lives of his neighbors and the vineyards of his community, where his curiosity, humility, and labor serve to cohere his vision of France, his family, and himself.”—Food & Wine, “Our Favorite Food Books of 2024” “Sentences . . . so polished that you will marvel at their brilliance.”—The Washington Post “Hoffman is a reflective and often lyrical writer . . . [his] newfound abilities—and the bumpy road to acquiring them—could be put to use in a very bingeable Netflix series.”—The Wall Street Journal, “The Best Books for Every Type of Wine Lover This Holiday Season” “It’s quite possibly the best autobiography I’ve ever read.”—Tamlyn Currin, Jancis Robinson sustainability editor and staff writer