In 1920, Nicholas Kilmer's grandfather Frederick Frieseke, one of the preeminent American impressionists, purchased a farmhouse in Mesnil, a Norman town almost completely (to quote a local taxi driver) sunken away dans la nature. Until his death in 1939 he lived and painted there in the company of his wife and daughter.

Long after the war that devastated Normandy, when Kilmer's grandmother's body was carried back from America to be buried alongside her husband in Mesnil, the family realized that they still owned the remnants of a large old Norman house standing amid many acres of orchard, woodland, and pasture. A Place in Normandy is a chronicle of renewed love and restoration, "subtly catching the rhythms of life and the flavor of an American family at ease in another culture" (Publishers Weekly).