Maureen Emerson has written her biography Riviera Dreaming – Love and War on the Côte d’Azur. This will be published by I B Tauris at the beginning of April.

www.rivieradreaming.co.uk and www.maureenemerson.co.uk

"In 1926 Barry Dierks, a young American architect, fell in love with France. With his partner, an ex-officer in the British Army, he built a white, flat-roofed Modernist masterpiece that rested on the rocks below the Esterel, with wonderful views across the azur sea. They called it Le Trident.

From the moment it was built, it captivated Riviera society. As commissions for more villas flooded in, Barry Dierks and Eric Sawyer ‘those two charmers’ flourished at the heart of the Riviera.

Over the years, Dierks would be responsible for designing and building over 70 of the Riviera’s most remarkable villas for clients ranging from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque and Jack Warner's Villa Aujourd'hui to the Marquess of Cholmondeley's Villa Le Roc, and Maxine Elliott's Château de l'Horizon, later the home of Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth.

Riviera Dreaming tells the dazzling story of the lives, loves and adventures that played out behind the walls of these glamorous houses and provides an unparalleled portrait of life on the Côte d‘Azur at the height of the Jazz Age.

When everything changed with the German occupation and the founding of Vichy France in 1940 and almost all their friends and clients fled, Barry and Eric stayed on, and showed their courage in their respective adventures."

Maureen will be launching her book in Valbonne and signing at Antibes Books. The dates and times are as follows:

Saturday, 14 April at 3.00 pm
The English Book Centre
12 Rue Alexis Julien,
06560 Valbonne, France 

Email: englishbooks@wanadoo.fr 

AND SIGNING

Saturday, 21 April at 11.30 am
Antibes Books
13, rue Georges Clemenceau,
06600 Antibes, France.

Email: info@antibesbooks.com