Teacher and occasional sports journalist Philippe Delerm seems to be known mainly as an author of little prose-poems, although he's also written novels, lyrics and memoirs, amongst other things. This 2015 collection contains around forty short prose pieces, mostly in the region of 300 words, each focussing as a lyric poem might on a single, quite specific experience. Most are pleasures of one sort or another — belles raisons d'habiter sur Terre like the texture of water-melon, the turbidity of the mojito, the colour of Venetian spritz, the smile it brings to other people's faces to see the narrator's small grandson immersed in a new book on the way home from the bookshop, the early-morning atmosphere of the seaside resort where M Hulot spent his famous holidays, the banquet on the last page of an Astérix story, and so on — but a few are darker, like the sight of the narrator's mother trying to make sense of her place in a care-home for Alzheimer's patients.

I don't know if Delerm's little pieces add to our understanding of sensual experiences at all, but they are very enjoyable to read in themselves: this would be a great book to give someone who doesn't read much but might need a little bit of positive energy from time to time. ( )