The books that transport you away.
Rob: Carlos Ruiz Zafon transports us to the streets of Barcelona, creating a fantastic sense of place and atmosphere. When we visited Barcelona we could appreciate even more the geography of the city, even though many of the places mentioned within The Shadow of the Wind were fictitious inventions.
Kate: “Conjured” is a good word in this case – Cold Mountain is more an area than a place you could really visit but that feeling of the Appalacians, the wild parts of America, the desolation and yet proximity to strange homesteads and their inhabitants, is quite intoxicating. Frazier – and Proulx too – has a talent for creating a real sense of American wilderness, liable to veer into the strange and outlandish and any moment and yet rooted completely in the real and visceral.
