The Rock Pool

Edgar Naylor arrives on the Côte d'Azur as a literary tourist with a notebook and a thesis about expatriate bohemians. Within weeks, the bohemians have absorbed him. Connolly's only novel is a wicked little comedy about a man who sets out to study decadence and ends up participating in it — enthusiastically, expensively, and with diminishing self-awareness. The small Riviera town (based on Villefranche-sur-Mer) is populated with painters, drunks, con artists, and women of complicated provenance. Connolly's prose is precise and merciless, his satire aimed as much at himself as his characters. The Rock Pool is the forgotten gem of interwar Riviera literature — a sharp, funny, uncomfortably honest portrait of what happens when the English middle class meets the Mediterranean sun.