No sooner do I arrive at Louis de Bernières’ house, an exquisite Georgian rectory deep in the Suffolk countryside, than he asks if I am descended, as he is, from French Huguenots.

He immediately beetles off to find a dictionary of Huguenot surnames to ascertain if Millard is in it. (It isn’t.) Five minutes later, he’s cheerfully telling me that he’s “almost an alkie”, but one who lays off the sauce in the day because he is fond of fooling around with power machinery.

A man who seems to vacillate in this way between the academic and the risqué, de Bernières, 53, hit the literary jackpot in 1993 with Captain Corelli’s Mandolin, a love story set on the Greek island of Cephalonia during the second world war. It took off by word of mouth, sold more than 1.5m copies and was adapted into a film starring Nicolas Cage and Penelope Cruz. It made its author a millionaire – and something of a recluse.

Thanks to Hollywood, de Bernières and his girlfriend, Cathy Gill, sold their modest flat in Earlsfield, south London, and bought the rectory – “It was a bit shabby, and the garden was just grass and nettles” - eight years ago for £450,000.

It was designed with Georgian reticence: the large bay windows on either end were an exuberant Victorian addition, but add a lot of light to the place. “They also take out cupboard space,” de Bernières says rather grumpily. “And they make the rectory look a bit like a French chateau from the garden. In the summer, you have to draw all the curtains and shutters, as sunshine blasts into the place.”

The white, five-bedroom house is huge, with doll’s house-style shuttered windows looking out onto a wide, verdant lawn fringed by trees, a vegetable patch and, at the bottom of the lawn, a shed where de Bernières likes to write – rather unfortunately, as it turns out. Work on his latest novel, A Partisan’s Daughter (a love story between a hapless middle-aged Englishman and a Yugoslavian babe, set in 1970s London), was brought to a halt when his outdoor study was burgled.

“My shed was broken into and my computer stolen,” he says. “On it were the first 50 pages. Eventually, it turned up in a ditch near Bungay [a nearby town], but I didn’t get it back for four months. I had contacted Norfolk police and it had been handed in to Suffolk police. It was only returned because someone had the bright idea of turning it on, and found the opening chapters.”

The son of an officer and a Wren, de Bernières was educated at public school on an Army scholarship and duly marched off to Sandhurst, where he lasted four months. After that, he drifted around. He was a cowboy, a gardener, a bookseller, a car repairer and a teacher. “For years, I had absolutely no career and no prospects,” he recalls.

At 32, however, his life began to take shape. “I decided to give up melancholy,” he says. “I was just so bored being depressed that I decided to be interested in life.” That did the trick. “I suddenly remembered my vocation, which was writing.”

At 50, de Bernières became a father to Robin, now 3, and six months ago he and Cathy had a second child, Sophie. What with his young family and his writing, de Bernières seems content in his sprawling Suffolk chateau. He plays his music, rebuilds old bangers and knocks out his novels. It’s pretty idyllic.

“We live in the middle of the countryside,” he says, “but I can easily get to the local cinema or the theatre. Our fish is straight out of the sea, and you can buy locally grown vegetables. Let me tell you, there is nothing nicer to eat than a freshly dug potato.” De Bernières grew up in the countryside and was desperate to get back. “I wanted to play the clarinet as loudly as I liked without annoying the neigh-bours,” he says. “I wanted elbow room; I wanted clean air. I also started to find it too much hassle living in London for other reasons.”

It was the celebrity achieved from writing the favourite summer read of the chattering classes that was the cata-lyst for the move. “A tabloid journalist started asking questions about me in the library,” he says. “She doorstepped my old girlfriend. She found my old English teacher. She got hold of my parents. Her newspaper had this theory that I was a mad recluse, hoarding my millions while living in this grotty little flat in Earlsfield. What bothered me was feeling that I couldn’t walk past the window without someone taking a photo. It was awful.

“I’m perfectly happy being famous and rich,” he continues pleasantly. “I just don’t want to be a celebrity.” He is also somewhat annoyed that Corelli looks like an amuse-bouche when compared with the thumpingly gargantuan bestsellers of recent years. “Captain Corelli was a bestseller in the early part of the 1990s,” he complains.

“Pretty soon, it was wiped out by Harry Potter and The Da Vinci Code.”

For all his jocularity and blithe enjoyment of family, clarinet and good wine, de Bernières seems more than a little piqued by JK Rowling and Dan Brown, the spoilsports who have bested him atop the literary charts. “People forget about you almost instantly when the next new book comes out by another writer,” he says, almost forgetting that, just five minutes earlier, he had been trumpeting the pleasures of noncelebrity in deepest Suffolk. Does he think there is a difference between fame and celebrity?

“Oh, you know there is,” de Bernières says. “I hardly do any television. I don’t do punditry. I don’t do quiz shows.” (He was even slightly nervous about appearing in a “lifestyle” publication such as Home.) “My life is about writing, about music, my family, my garden. If I don’t feel like writing, I don’t try. I just go back up to the house. Or mow the lawn.”

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