THAILAND - island life (Ko Phi Phi)

Cross Current by John Shors, set on Ko Phi Phi, Thailand now appears on the new TripFiction website

Tropical Island Life

If you can get to a tropical island any time soon, then reading fiction set in paradise is (more or less) the next best thing. It's hot, it's sunny and you can almost feel the sand beneath your feet, dive in and enjoy a good read "See a location through an author's eyes"

☼ ☼ The Maldives ☼ Tuin ☼ KoPhi Phi Island ☼ ☼

The TripFiction team conjectures from events in the book, that this book is set in The Maldives; however the book only acknowledges that it is set somewhere "exotic". It encapsulates island life through the eyes of a hotel manager in a 6* resort....
How does it feel to live and work in the world's most beautiful and luxurious tropical island resort, surrounded by white sandy beaches and aquamarine seas? How does it feel to be in the lap of luxury when you're thousands of miles from anywhere else? And when the guests are some of the richest and most demanding people in the world, where do you find the energy every day to smile, smile and smile again?



Another Maldives set novel: When thirty-year-old English teacher Anna Emerson is offered a summer job tutoring T.J. Callahan at his family's holiday home in the Maldives, she accepts without hesitation: a tropical island beats the library any day!
T.J. has no desire to leave town, not that anyone asked him. He's almost seventeen and has had cancer. Anna and T.J. are en route to join T.J.'s family in the Maldives when the pilot of their seaplane suffers a fatal heart attack and crash-lands in the Indian Ocean. Marooned on an uninhabited island, Anna and T.J. work together to obtain water, food, fire and shelter but, as the days turn to weeks then months and finally years, Anna begins to wonder if the biggest challenge of all might be living with a boy who is gradually becoming a man...


Now take yourselves back to the 1980s and 1990s and there are two outstanding books which delve into the vagaries of tropical island life, one read, the quintessential "The Beach" was turned into a film with Leonardo di Caprio and charts the demise of the good life on an island near Ko Phi Phi in Thailand; the other is "Castaway" a year on the island of Tuin, just off the coast of Papua New Guinea and Australia - Lucy Irvine responds to an advertisement " Writer seeks "wife" for a year on a tropical island" and this is an account of her time spent experiencing remote island life with a man she barely knows. Both books in their different ways capture the heat, the tropics, the isolation and how people face challenging situations....

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Books set on Ko Phi Phi Island, THAILAND

We were really pleased to come across these two books about the islands of Ko Phi Phi Don and Ko Phi Phi Leh in Krabi Province, Thailand. Such a beautiful place, sadly devastated by the Tsunami of 2004, but up and running again and welcoming tourists. If you click on the Tripfiction logo below and you will be taken to our blogpost on Phuket, which adds a couple more fabulous reads that evoke this part of Thailand.


Let Not the Waves of the Sea by Simon Stephenson tells the sobering story of one brother visiting the island after his brother Dominic's death in the Tsunami of  December 2004 and how he and his family come to terms with such a premature and devastating event. The book was serialised on BBC Radio 4 Book of the Week.







Cross Currents by John Shors sets the scene so incredibly well for Thai island life, the smells, the cuisine, the heat, the tropical downpours and is a great example of what TripFiction is about.

And no list of books set on Koh Phi Phi would be complete without Alex Garland's The Beach. In our ever-shrinking world, where popular Western culture seems to have infected every nation on the planet, it is hard to find even a small niche of unspoiled land--forget searching for pristine islands or continents. This is the situation in Alex Garland's debut novel, The Beach. Human progress has reduced Eden to a secret little beach near Thailand. In the tradition of grand adventure novels, Richard, a rootless traveller rambling around Thailand on his way somewhere else, is given a hand-drawn map by a madman who calls himself Daffy Duck. He and two French travellers set out on a journey to find this paradise.


And to see all our books set in Thailand click here 




"see a location through an author's eyes"