Just because we’re not spreading our wings just now, doesn’t mean we can’t dream of exotic lands…
We love delving into a good book and while we can’t travel we’re relying on the world’s wordsmiths to transport us to to all of those dreamy location we’ll be booking next year when we’re allowed to explore the world again.
While you’re at it, why not eschew the big guns this Christmas and support local? The brilliant bookshop.org has been set up to support the UK’s independent booksellers and stocks hundreds of tomes from independent bookshops around the country.
Chocolat by Joanne Harris
An oldie but a goodie, close your eyes and you can picture yourself strolling the cobbled streets of many a sun-dappled French village, such is Harris’s wonderfully descriptive writing. It may not have a chocolate shop, but Montolieu in the L’Occitane region, named The Village of Books, could be the book’s Lansquenet-sous-Tannes, with its wonderfully characterful streets.
Love After Love by Ingrid Persaud
Set amid the tropical beaches of Trinidad, Love After Love tells the tale of a widow, her son and their lodger and the real meaning of family. Written in Trini dialect, you can almost hear the locals leaping out of its pages.
Call Me By Your Name by André Aciman
You can’t fail to fall in love with the Oscar-winning movie adaption of Aciman’s love story. The pages of this one will transport you to the dusty days of an Italian summer, with its bike rides to the market and lazy hazy afternoons in the sun . We know where we’ll be booking next summer.
A Theatre for Dreamers, Polly Samson
Set on the bohemian Greek island of Hydra in the 1960s, A Theatre For Dreamers tells the tangled tales of writers and poets, musicians, artists and hippies, free spirits and magnetic personalities. If it doesn’t immediately stir a longing to be barefoot on an island paradise I don’t know what till.
The Old Drift by Namwali Surpell
This award-winning tome is set in 1904 on the banks of the Zambezi river. It tells the tale of three warring families, against a vibrant Zambian backdrop in the shadows of the magnificent Victoria Falls; prepare to be googling flights before you’re halfway through…
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