Annie Hawes: The other side of paradise

A rustico on a hill. Fifty olive trees gripping on to the slope. A cat by the door. Views out to the Mediterranean. Lemons and broccoli growing wild in the garden. It's the Italian hideaway of a million British dreams. Except that it's freezing. The thermometer on the veranda says 9C. "It's not normally this cold," says Annie Hawes, firing up a very small paraffin heater and putting some coffee on the wood-burning stove.

When she bought this house in the Ligurian hills 20 years ago, the stove and heater were not there. Neither were the toilet and fridge. "Look! A fridge with a light," she says, opening and closing the door. She digs out a photo of her old fridge – the size of a small portable TV – to illustrate how much progress has been made. The new model came from some kind German neighbours, although it isn't perfect. Sometimes it breaks down, due to spiders building a nest near the pilot light.

Olives, vines and writers have long thrived on the Italian Riviera. Shelley and Byron sailed their boats off its coast. Elizabeth von Arnim's novel, The Enchanted April, about a group of women finding sunny contentment after the First World War, is set on the other side of the bay. Her heroines answered an advertisement promising "wisteria and sunshine". Annie Hawes' idea of heaven in Italy was rather different. Her sister, Lucy, saw an advertisement for a 10-week job grafting roses in the village of Diano San Pietro, and persuaded Annie to come, too, with promises of "Mediterranean fleshpots, sparkling seas, bronzed suitors with unbearably sexy accents, wild nightlife".

It didn't quite turn out like that. Although only two miles inland from the coastal resort of Diano Marina, the villagers did not look favourably on the pleasure-seeking going on down the road. And certainly not out of season. When Annie and her sister tried to go swimming on a balmy March day, they were ordered from the water by a well-meaning local lady in a fur jacket. To swim before July was to flirt with death.

Scolded from the beach, the sisters decided to go for a walk in the hills. Finding an abandoned rustico, Annie squeezed in through a window and had a look around while Lucy ate some cherries growing near the front door. A local farmer saw them, introduced them to the owner, and within weeks, the rustico was theirs for £2,000. A publisher couldn't have asked for a better beginning. Annie's first book about her life in the Ligurian hills, Extra Virgin, was published in 2001 and sold over 200,000 copies. Her second, Ripe for the Picking, is currently at No 6 on the bestseller lists, and is Radio 4's current Book of the Week.

The Olive Season, Carol Drinkwater's second book about her life on an olive farm near Nice, only a few miles up the coast from Annie, is at No 8. Those who prayed for a plague on all books about middle-aged Britons finding fulfillment in a haze of olives, lemons or vines have been disappointed. The genre that grew from Peter Mayle's A Year in Provence is alive and well and spawning sequels. The appetite of weary Britons for this dream of warmth, free time and, if you're really lucky, free love is only tempered by their envy for the writers living the dream and growing fat on their six-figure advances.

However, unlike other British authors abroad, Annie's laptop wasn't the first thing she unpacked. She didn't start writing her books until she had lived in Italy for 10 years. In fact, it proves hard to get any of the clichés to stick. The path to the bestseller lists, as trodden by Mayle et al, should begin with a midlife crisis brought on by living in Britain for too long, and an inkling that life would be better a few hundred miles south. Inside the front cover of Extra Virgin, it says that Annie is originally from Shepherd's Bush. But she didn't live there for long.

"I've lived all over the place. I lived in south London, north London and west London before I was eight," she says. By 16, she'd ticked off Bristol, the Cotswolds, Birmingham and Edinburgh. Her teacher parents used to move every few years. Before setting up home in Liguria, she had lived in both Portugal and France for a couple of years. She bridles at the suggestion that moving to Italy was an escape. "I'm not talking about running away, becoming a different person, finding the earthly paradise you've been looking for," she says. "Italy is a place like all the other places you might end up in."

In person, she's also oddly reluctant to indulge in another staple of her genre: the hilarious anecdote about the locals. Not that Ripe for the Picking isn't heaving with such stories. There's the time when she stayed up all night helping her neighbours to make passata. The time she woke up to find her garden full of goats. Or there's the story of one of her first dates with her partner, Ciccio, a local who used to run a restaurant on the other side of the valley. Annie had got dressed up, only to find that she would be helping him to repair his mother's outdoor oven by applying liberal amounts of cow dung.

"I've got a mental block about Ripe for the Picking at the moment," she says, cautiously. "Although, I suppose Ciccio's mother's snail cage is one of my ongoing favourite things. "She's got a snail cage in the branches of a tangerine tree in her garden. When she finds a snail, she puts it in there until there's enough to make a snail dinner." Her eyes light up a little and then fade. Perhaps producing tales to pepper the conversation at British dinner parties is not what she thinks her books are about. What does she think they're about? "My idea was that the first book was about life in an Italian village – the basic rules and regulations. And the second one was about getting to know families. But that's not what anyone else seems to think."

She feels misunderstood: a chronicler of real life cast as a hawker of dreams. She seems, somewhat bizarrely, to be trapped against her will in a British fantasy about Italy. "I find the British notion that Italy is this perfect, paradise place quite alarming," she says. "I don't like being turned into part of it." In an effort to redress the balance, she tells me a story about the wake for Ciccio's father, Salvatore. Ciccio's mother, Francesca, had burst into tears, saying that she'd never wanted to marry Salvatore and had had no affection from him in 50 years of marriage. To Annie's horror, Ciccio's family was not sympathetic. "Everyone started shouting at Francesca, saying that that was normal for everyone of her generation so she had nothing to complain about."

Annie has lived the Italian dream and found it, well, rather ordinary. The vision hasn't become a nightmare, just one of those prosaic dreams with good bits and bad bits. Annie's interest is in investigating the ordinariness. "At a very early age, because I moved around so much, I learnt that there was not simply one normality, but lots of competing ones," she says. "From then on, it became a sort of lifetime study to collect as many normalities as I could."

We go out collecting later. Stopping at a café in Diano San Pietro and ordering a home-made digestivo made from wild myrtle, Annie suggests that we go outside and watch the traffic. Ignoring the chilly wind, she sits by the roadside, chatting to the villagers driving past, swapping gossip and finding out what they're up to. After a life of moving every few years, she is now settled in Liguria. Opposite, there is an inscription under the village church's sundial. It reads: "Look, mortals, at the time and consider how fast the shadow grows." I can't help but think that she's using her time in the sun rather well.

'Ripe for the Picking' by Annie Hawes is published in paperback by Penguin, £6.99

Great escape: the books that made the genre

A Year in Provence by Peter Mayle (Penguin)

The alpha male of the pack. Ex-advertising man's move to Luberon and a new life makes him a fortune and marks the genesis of the genre.

Driving Over Lemons: An Optimist in Andalucia by Chris Stewart (Sort Of)

Talking of Genesis, original drummer (briefly and unprofitably) of the 70s rockers moves to Andalucia and it's no picnic. Frank, funny and fragrant.

On Rue Tatin: The Simple Pleasures of a Small French Town by Susan Hermann Loomis (Harper Collins)

The gushings of an American cookery writer who settles in Normandy, wins round the neighbours and unexpectedly conceives a child somewhere between the recipes for potages and tartes which appear at the end of each chapter.

The Olive Farm: A Memoir of Life, Love and Olive Oil in the South of France by Carol Drinkwater (Abacus)

Sums up the amorous antics of the actress from of All Creatures Great and Small. She takes on a farmhouse, an olive grove and a central casting-handsome Frenchman. Oleaginous.

Under The Tuscan Sun: A Home in Italy by Frances Mayes (Bantam)

Heart-warming, sun-baked account of restoring a villa in Tuscany. With recipes, of course. Including pesto, obviously. Original, obviously not. Soon to be a movie.

Vanilla Beans and Brodo: Real Life in the Hills of Tuscany by Isabella Dusi (Pocket)

Tuscan hill town really does seethe with passions, as Australian settler discovers. Seasons, friendships, humour, wine-making... and lots of food.

A Thousand Days in Venice: An Unexpected Romance by Marlena de Blasi (Virago)

Part memoir, part cookery book by an American chef who turns her back on home after finding love with a local. Sun, sensuous flavours a selling exercise for their tour business.

Life in a Postcard: Escape to the French Pyrenees by Rosemary Bailey (Bantam)

With a stamp of predictability, as writer does up a medieval French monastery in an area of rugged beauty and decent, rough-around-the-edges neighbours.

A House in the Sunflowers by Ruth Silvestre (Allison and Busby)

France somewhere. It's hot. There's a holiday home to renovate. Eating takes place.

Caroline Stacey