Louis de Bernières is extremely amusing. During our Zoom, the multi-million-copy-selling author has me properly chuckling as we talk about everything from golf (‘I quite like playing on my own because you can cheat as much as you like’) to his cats (‘they do competitive theft’). His new book – Smelling of Rooks: Nine Years in the Norfolk Alps – is equally laugh-out-loud. It’s Louis’ first non-fiction work, adapted from his popular Facebook posts written between 2015 and 2024 that chronicled his day-to-day life in rural Norfolk.

Louis hasn’t always resided in the county. Though he was brought up in Surrey, he spent a decade in London. It was whilst working as a supply teacher in the capital that he wrote Captain Corelli’s Mandolin on a small word processor he christened ‘Esmerelda’. Since its publication in 1994, the novel – a love story between a young Italian officer posted to the Greek island of Cephalonia during the Second World War and Pelagia, the local doctor’s daughter – has won countless awards, sold over 1.5million copies and been made into a Hollywood film. Its author was catapulted into the spotlight. 

‘It was around 2000 and I was quite spooked by the amount of attention I was getting. I was in danger of becoming a celebrity or some kind of Radio Four pundit,’ Louis tells me. ‘I wanted elbow room. I wanted to play the clarinet as loud as I liked and to shoot things in the garden. I used to come up to Bungay to visit Elizabeth Jane Howard, who I’d made friends with at the King’s Lynn Festival years ago. One day she said, “I’ve seen this really wonderful house nearby. It would really suit you.” So I came to look at it and it’s where I live now. It was very dilapidated. It’s a lifetime DIY project, which I will never finish – but I like DIY.’ 

The house in question is a Georgian rectory surrounded by a big garden with a winterbourne running through it, just outside the village of Denton. It’s where his children, Sophie, who has just done her A-levels, and Robin, who is now at university, have grown up. ‘I thought if I bring them up here, they can have the same kind of childhood I had in the Surrey Hills. It is the kind of place where your mother could say to you, “Go out and play and don’t come back till it’s dark.” Where you can spend hours poking at dead leaves in a ditch.’

In 2015, under pressure to ‘do social media’, he started posting regularly on Facebook about their life in the ‘Norfolk Alps’, musing on everything from parenting to politics, cats to cooking, village gossip to his gout. ‘I started it as a consolation on Sunday evenings after the children went back to their mother. I had a sort of fifty-fifty arrangement with her. People kept posting in the comments section saying, “You must publish this as a book because it’s so funny.”’ The ‘blog’ came to an end in 2024, in part because Louis ended up locked out of his account.

Luckily for us, Louis listened to his Facebook followers and his ‘accidental memoir’ Smelling of Rooks has just been published by Norfolk-based Salt. ‘There are two reasons for that. I want this book to do well in East Anglia. Also, Salt is a very hardworking and worthwhile publisher, which deserves all the success it can get.’ The book is a heartwarming read, filled with anecdotes about family, friendship and the unpredictable joys of daily life in Norfolk, told with all the observational humour and quiet eccentricity that make Louis one of our best-loved storytellers (if you haven’t read Notwithstanding, you should). 

Nature features heavily in the new book, including the titular rooks. Louis and Robin would nurse the bird babies who fell from their nests in the huge rookery in the garden. ‘There was one [rook] who was with me for three years. She used to sit on my shoulder and would murmur into my ear. She was absolutely charming. She was also possessive. She wouldn’t let any woman near me,’ he recalls. ‘I gave up bringing them up in the house because when rooks are bored, they get very destructive. They will shred your lampshades. I now have a big wire construction in the garden called the Bird Hospital.’ Their smell, I ask, referring to the title of the book? ‘It’s warm and sweet and a little bit musty.’ Though the rooks no longer call the rectory home, his five cats have the run of the place. ‘They’re definitely an enhancement to one’s life, but they do complicate things a lot, mainly because of the theft. They steal food or they bring bits in for you. I love the cats and they love me, but a cat’s love is not the same as a dog’s love.’

Having described Norfolk as the ‘centre of the universe’, I wonder what a typical day for Louis might look like. There’s work, of course. He has a new novel out next autumn, set in France. ‘It’s about a young man having his first fling with a woman and a much older woman having her last. And this winter I intend to write a novel which is set in the 1970s somewhere up north. It’ll be another coming-of-age book.’ When he’s not fighting for keyboard space with his huge tabby – his words, not mine – ‘I like pike fishing in the Waveney River; the fishing is one reason I moved to Norfolk.’ Golf, too. ‘All the golf courses around here were designed by James Braid, who was one of the great golfers of the early 20th century. I use wooden shaft clubs, so I play the courses as they were meant to be played.’ He also owns classic cars including a Morris Minor Traveller and a Ford Popular, ‘which years ago I found abandoned in a field on the way to Cromer … I spent the whole summer rebuilding it when I should have been working.’

He’s an accomplished multi-instrumentalist and singer-songwriter. ‘I mainly play a classical guitar, but not necessarily in classical style. My style is slightly flamenco-y, but I sometimes have a mandolin or a banjo or a Turkish oud. In the old days, quite often a flute or clarinet … I can play most instruments to a level well enough to record with, but not necessarily to perform with.’ That said, he’s just come back from the Edinburgh Fringe, where he did three concerts. ‘As I’ve got older, I’ve got less stage fright. The writer Alain de Botton once said to me that he wasn’t scared of failure because one day he was going to die anyway. And I thought, there’s a heck of a lot of truth in that.’

On the subject of failure, I ask Louis whether he was able to enjoy the phenomenal success of Captain Corelli or if there was always an underlying pressure to write the next blockbuster? ‘I enjoyed it in some ways and not in others. I was suddenly asked to do festivals all over the world. I got flown to Shanghai, New Zealand and Australia. I went all over Europe and to Hong Kong three times. I did two American book tours,’ he says. ‘It was all a tremendous ego trip, but it takes huge chunks out of your time. It’s also very distracting, so you can’t focus on what it was that you wanted to write. And I did begin to feel after a while, as you hinted, an intense pressure to write the same book again, but totally different. And then I thought “That’s ridiculous”. Very, very few people can write a succession of great books.’

In 2001, he wrote the next one – Red Dog, charting the life of a dog in Western Australia, which was later made into a film. ‘It’s become as much of a classic in Australia as Captain Corelli has here. That was my way back in and I felt, “okay, I’m free now”. And then I wrote a book which I think is far better than Captain Corelli called Birds Without Wings. It’s about what happened at the end of the Ottoman Empire. It has become a classic in Turkey – they use it to teach Ottoman history in universities. My feeling is it sort of doesn’t matter where your book succeeds, as long as it does.’ 

I have no doubt that Smelling of Rooks will resonate in East Anglia – and far beyond. ‘I hope people read it with a smile on their faces and have a good laugh every now and then. I think it’s the kind of book you can chuckle over when you’re in the loo. It doesn’t matter if you don’t read it from cover to cover. You can just dip into any old bit.’ Our time is up. It’s been delightful. Louis is just as he comes across in the book. Friendly, funny, brilliantly perceptive. It’s a shame he no longer keeps a blog – his daily reflections are too good to be kept in his head. ‘People tell me I should because my life is just as interesting and weird now,’ he smiles. 

Smelling of Rooks: Nine Years in the Norfolk Alps is published by Salt Publishing, £12.99