The Year of Magical Thinking meets Salvation Creek in a powerful memoir of love, loss and discovery – the third act in an extraordinary life. Mary Moody's bestselling memoirs about her adventures in France, Au Revoir and Last Tango in Toulouse, inspired thousands of women. The Accidental Tour Guide completes the circle by sharing another major turning point in her life. When Mary loses her beloved husband, her world is turned upside down. Part of her journey to reignite her passion for living is to boldly go where she has never been before – in her travels and in her everyday life. A powerful, moving and inspiring true story about how to rebuild your life without the people who matter most.

In Au Revoir she ran away. In Last Tango her world turned upside down. Now, her relationships are about to reach boiling point.In the European summer of 2003 a deadly heat wave strikes France. To Mary Moody, living in her rural village in the south-west of France, it seems that the weather is merely imitating the stifling heat of her marriage, which is on the verge of collapse following the events recounted in Last Tango in Toulouse.But despite relentlessly hot days and an uncertain future, Mary's new-found passion for life cannot be suppressed. It is not long before she is once again torn between her two desires: for the independence of her life in France; and for the love and continuity of her marriage and family life in Australia. While Mary immerses herself in the pleasures of her second home – the food and wine, the markets, her colourful circle of friends – a shattering turn of events comes when she least expects it.Au Revoir and Last Tango in...

Pan Macmillan has been on a long and very successful journey with Mary Moody. The trilogy of books describing her escape from mid-life crises – Au Revoir, Last Tango in Toulouse and The Long Hot Summer – has reached a generation of Australian women.In her new book Sweet Surrender, after all of her escapades and adventures, Mary has come full circle and has embraced surrendering to the inevitable. Surrendering to ageing, to the pull of family, to the happiness derived from a life that is centred on others as well as herself, and to the undeniable influence of her parents and her family on the person she is. It's been a journey that has taught her a lot, but in the end the needs of her family – her four children and her grandchildren – turned out to be a lot more important than her French affairs.At the heart of Sweet Surrender, Mary challenges the illusion of eternal youth that's attributed to the baby boomer generation and the idea that she can...

The year of her fiftieth birthday, Mary Moody ran away from home, family and work for six months to live in a remote French village. Her book about these experiences, Au Revoir, struck a chord with tens of thousands of readers across Australia. Yet those experiences were to mark a beginning rather than an end. They were six months that turned the rest of her life upside down, as she bought a house in the village, persuaded her husband to sell the family home of twenty-five years and take up goose farming in central NSW and abandoned her television career in favour of writing about her travelling experiences.Yet even these dramatic events were merely the outward signs of far deeper changes that challenged the stability of thirty years of monogamy and motherhood. To her surprise, Mary found herself grappling with the intense emotion of an affair, and its consequences on her marriage and family. Amid this turmoil, Mary also rediscovered a sister not seen by the family for...

Popular gardening writer and television presenter Mary Moody is part of a generation of women who 'had it all'. At fifty, her life was full, with a fulfilling career, a husband, children and even grandchildren. The only thing missing was time for herself, a chance to reflect on life and its meaning–so Mary decided to say au revoir. For six glorious months, she left her work, family and friends to live on her own in the South of France. Au Revoir is the story of Mary's solo journey. It is funny, warm and reflective, as Mary adapts to life as a single person in one of the most delightful parts of rural France. Revelling in the food, seasons and characters she encounters, Mary's book will strike a chord with every woman managing a busy life.