One of the things I love about reading is that I can explore the world without leaving home, and this year the prospect of traveling through fiction is more tempting than ever. The author has done the legwork for us, booking flights, studying maps, and deciphering foreign languages so that we can sit back and enjoy ourselves. In our imaginations, we sunbathe on perfect beaches, trek through snowy mountains, or visit forests and castles. Lost in a good book, we can smell the frangipani, taste the papayas, feel the seawater cooling our skin. And then we close the book and we’re instantly home, with no jet lag, no suitcases to unpack, and a credit card balance that doesn’t make us weak at the knees.
When I was writing my debut novel, The Girl in the Mirror, I loved taking the reader to faraway places—bustling Thailand, the idyllic Seychelles, a yacht in the middle of the Indian Ocean—but I also loved revisiting those places myself. As a recently divorced mum with four children, too busy to schedule a real holiday, writing provided a relaxing escape from everyday life, and so did reading. Here are some books that have transported me to places I’ve never been with such vividness that I feel as though I have.
Call Me Evie by JP Pomare
“Evie,” the young woman who narrates this impressive debut thriller, is coy about everything including her real name, but she doesn’t hold back when describing Maketu, the brooding, remote New Zealand village she finds herself living in with a mysterious man who seems to be her captor. While Evie misses the city she left behind, the reader is enthralled by the wintry, haunted landscape, the menacing ocean, and the locals who seem to know too much about her troubled past. Melbourne-based Pomare chose a setting he knows intimately as the perfect backdrop to this atmospheric and unsettling tale.
The Dry by Jane Harper
The fictional town of Kiewarra may be in a temperate part of Australia, but all the same, it is stricken by a drought that, year after year, erodes the town’s resources and exposes long-dead secrets. Detective Aaron Falk returns to the hometown he left decades ago and finds many things have changed. As the lush landscape of his youth is contrasted with the barrenness of the present day, so the innocence of a fondly remembered high school romance is contrasted with the horrific double murder that he has been asked to investigate. And Falk’s past also involved a mysterious death. Perhaps solving the present homicide requires him to delve deep into long-buried memories.
Jane Harper’s debut thriller brilliantly intertwines Falk’s personal story with the tale of a town profoundly affected by its changing, drying landscape.
All the Birds, Singing by Evie Wyld
Australian-born, UK-based Wyld leaps from one end of the world to the other with every chapter of this tightly plotted novel. The story alternates between the present day on a stormy English island and past events that occurred under the blazing sun of a Queensland sheep station. Wyld breaks most of the crime fiction “rules,” and much of the story is revealed in reverse chronological order. The reader is dizzied but never confused by the contrasts between the English cold and the Australian heat, but what the two landscapes have in common is a rawness that offers no safe harbor to the brooding, secretive heroine.
Something in the Water by Catherine Steadman
Newlyweds Mark and Erin escape their ordinary life in Britain for an idyllic honeymoon on Bora Bora, a resort island in Tahiti, where it seems the most stressful event of each day will be deciding which cocktail to have brought to your recliner. The Pacific Ocean is brought to life in Steadman’s vivid descriptions and it lives up to its name, providing a peaceful backdrop to the sinister events of the novel. This couple is young and in love, and it feels as if nothing could go wrong, but their romantic paradise turns out to be the place where their real problems begin. Sumptuous descriptions of Tahiti’s tropical reefs round out this otherwise dark and disturbing read.
Dead Calm by Charles F Williams
Another honeymooners-at-sea thriller, this novel is quite different from the film version starring Nicole Kidman, Sam Neill and Billy Zane. The book is a sequel to the novel Aground, but it is much better known today, perhaps because it spawned two films, although The Deep, directed by Orson Welles, was never finished.
The story takes place entirely on board two boats in the middle of the Indian Ocean, a setting that becomes increasingly claustrophobic as the novel progresses. Despite the idyllic scenery, this is one of those travel novels that leaves you glad you stayed home.
The Scarlet Pimpernel by Baroness Orczy
It might be more than a hundred years old, with language that’s a little old-fashioned at times, but this novel has it all: a daring night-time yacht journey to revolutionary France, a heroine with a shameful past, a simmering romance and a brilliant plot twist. Surely only a baroness could write such a grand novel.
The scarlet pimpernel was the first hero with a secret identity, and he inspired many others including Superman, Spider-Man and Batman. Orczy evokes her settings with great skill, from a seaside English tavern full of spies to a perilous cliff in coastal France. Marguerite is a fabulous heroine, especially when you remember that she completes her adventures while maintaining her impeccable eighteenth-century clothing.
Smilla’s Sense of Snow by Peter Høeg
Many argue that this 1992 thriller started the craze for Nordic Noir; what everyone can agree on is that the beautiful, wintry setting is crucial to this novel’s eerie vibe. The heroine, Smilla, draws on her Inuit heritage to understand a snow-covered crime scene that the police dismiss as an accident. Her suspicions lead her on a trail of discovery which eventually takes her back to Greenland, her childhood home. The tension rises as Smilla is led further and further into the icy heart of the Arctic. The final chase left me so chilled I found it hard to believe I hadn’t been racing across the tundra myself.
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