LONDON: louche living in the Swinging 60s

Three Brothers by Peter Ackroyd, set in London

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FLORENCE - Rosa blossoms in this beautiful city

Tuscan Rose by Belinda Alexandra, set in Florence, first half 20th Century

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GERMANY and a NORTH SEA ISLAND: a psychological suspense story

Therapy by Sebastian Fitzek set in Germany/North Sea

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NEW YORK - an exciting roller coaster of a read

The Helper by David Jackson, set in New York, 

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LAUSANNE 'Une aventure'*

Our review of A Heart Bent Out Of Shape by Emylia Hall set in Lausanne is now on our new website. You can find it here.

NEWCASTLE-UPON-TYNE/LONDON Family trauma

The Other Family by Joanna Trollope set in London and Newcastle upon Tyne

Richie is the link between two families who live 300 miles apart, in London and in Newcastle upon Tyne. Two families; one wife, one partner and four children. Intriguing.

But then Richie, a successful musician, suddenly dies and leaves the two families with different problems to sort out. The two families have never met but know of each other. Richie never divorced his first wife, Margaret who lives in Tynemouth with a son, Scott who is in his late 30s. In London, I’m not sure where, Chrissie tries to pick up the pieces of her devastating loss with her three daughters, Tamsin, Dilly and Amy. The reading of Richie’s will brings the family together over a sentimental legacy. Changes have to be made but there is an issue with acceptance of the situation they find themselves in.

But how does it bring them together?

Joanna Trollope successfully portrays the emotions and dynamics of family life and relationships.

The novel is set in two different cities. I know Newcastle upon Tyne well and the buildings mentioned, The Sage and The Baltic to name a few. I can picture these iconic buildings and the view that is described of the Tyne Bridge from Scott’s city centre flat. But I am wondering if there is a strong enough emphasis upon the place that other readers would want to visit if they had not before. But Newcastle upon Tyne does have a hold for one of the family members not only because of its difference to London but also because of the music opportunities she can take. And of course Newcastle upon Tyne has long associations with many iconic musicians: Sting, Dire Straits, Bryan Ferry, Lindisfarne, The Lighthouse Family, and Cheryl Cole....(to mention but a few).

This is an interesting read and once again Joanna Trollope has written a winner with her successful style. Some of the sentences take up half a page. It took me a while to get used to this; but it reads like someone having the conversation in their head. However, for me the cities could have been anywhere and I don’t know if I would have wanted to visit them. But after all this book is about people, relationships, their struggles and coming to terms with a new future.

Thanks to Ann Reddy for reviewing this for TripFiction If you would like to really get under the skin of the North East of England, then we have many novels that will do that for you. Just click here And London as you can imagine is really well represented on the website!

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'BROOKLYN' - one of the Greatest Travel Books, what do you think?

Brooklyn by Colm Tóibín was awarded the 2009 Costa Novel Award, and of course is set in Brooklyn, New York. Clean, clear writing that spurs the reader into turning page after page!

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WEST AFRICA - 1990s ex-pat life with a twist

The Cloths of Heaven by Sue Eckstein set in West Africa

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Intrigue in VIENNA

The Crooked Maid by Dan Vyleta set in Vienna

Our review of The Crooked Maid now appears on the new TripFiction site here

NEW SOUTH WALES "Samanlaiset linnut lentävät yhdessä" *

The Railwayman's Wife by Ashley Hay set in Thirroul, NSW

A tender exploration of marriage and loss for a young woman and her child, living in New South Wales. From the early days of Mac and Ani's marriage, when life glows for the two of them, to the post war years when the couple has a young daughter Bella. 

Their marriage is the centrepiece of the narrative, beautifully captured as the couple relationship evolves and matures. Ani's family is originally from Scandinvavia and on the morning of her wedding to Mac, her Father writes in her daybook *"The same kinds of birds fly together"  in Finnish (as per the title of this post). The novel is set against the background of World War II and its aftermath. Melancholic in feel, the reader accompanies Ani as she takes up the job of librarian at the Thirroul Railway Institute Library, the thunder of the D57 steam trains punctuating the storyline with their hissing, demanding presence. 

"The trailing detritus of the war" has left its mark on Frank Draper whose memories are clouded by the people he encountered during his years as medic to the wounded. And Roy McKinnon, too, poet and ponderer, who struggles to find his creativity because of his own experiences of the last few years. Their love of the written word is at the heart of the interchanges that Roy and Ani have, especially "Kangaroo" by D H Lawrence, which Ani holds dear. It is set in the very same area in which they live, and she enthuses "I loved the idea that such a story could come from such a pretty seaside town". 

Bella skips her way through the book, preventing the book from sinking into real melancholia, and the reader is left with hope for the future.

Ashley Hay very kindly agreed to answer some of our questions, so we hand over to her. Enjoy!

TF: We had to look Thirroul up on the map! What inspired you to set your novel in this New South Wales location?

AH: I grew up in Austinmer, the next village up the coast from Thirroul, and I’ve always wanted to write about that landscape – it has an amazing escarpment that reaches down almost to the ocean, and combination of the sky and the mountain and the water always made it feel a special sort of place.

The novel is partly inspired by an actual moment in my family’s history (my grandfather was killed in a railway accident and my grandmother was given the job of Railway Institute librarian in compensation for this) and that story did take place in Thirroul – albeit with very different incidents and characters to those in The Railwayman’s Wife. And because I wanted to include the idea of D. H. Lawrence in the book (he wrote Kangaroo during a short stay in Thirroul in the early 1920s), I wanted to keep the fiction in its actual factual space.

TF: The novel has real psychological insight into ‘loss’. How did it affect you writing about loss and death and how did you keep you keep yourself buoyant?

AH: While I was writing scenes about Anikka Lachlan, the railwayman’s wife, hearing about her husband’s death, or the sections about the war experiences of the poet, Roy McKinnon, or the doctor, Frank Draper, it didn’t feel different to the mechanics or processes of any other pieces of writing – I was just trying to make the voices sound right, trying to make the narrative whole.

But I know that after I’d written out the scene when Mac, the railwayman, dies (which you learn about very early in the book but don’t read about until almost the end), I was incredibly anxious about my own husband’s safety and well-being for a couple of weeks. It felt like a nasty kind of chutzpah to go around killing off perfectly lovely husbands … and I made sure mine stayed well away from anything locomotive for as long as I could.

TF: The rumble of the railways is like a constant hum in the background. Do you have a particular interest in trains, as there is quite some detail about engines and so forth.

AH: I’m glad that sound – that rumble – came through, because sound was one of the ways I found this novel in the first place. I was listening to a talk in the library where my grandmother had worked when a train pulled into the platform outside and I realized how horrifically close and big and huge it sounded. I realized she’d had to work that close to the sound of the thing that had killed her husband, every single day for years. And I was fascinated by that proximity.

As for the detail about trains, I have to make a confession: I had a son while I was writing this novel, and he’s the kind of lovely little boy who loves trains – reading about them, watching them, playing with them, building his own tracks. So, really, a lot of my train-ish research came from reading him Rev. W. Awdry’s original Thomas the Tank Engine books – which are a very good source for these sorts of particulars. I could feel like a tops mother who was reading a huge number of books to her small person while I was secretly researching halts and footplates and boilers and guards at the same time …

TF: How did you come to writing? And do you have any tips for aspiring writers?

AH: There weren’t a lot of writers around on the south coast of New South Wales in the late 1980s – D. H. Lawrence was long gone – so I wasn’t sure how to go about becoming one. I did a journalism degree thinking that I might be able to get a job as a journalist and then work out if I was any good at this intriguing other sort of writing after that. It turned out to be a good theory and I made my way from journalism’s starting point through essays and narrative non-fiction to this seductive world of writing fiction and Making Things Up. But I still work as a freelance journalist – you get to enjoy having words appear much more rapidly than they can when you’re working as a novelist, which is nice.

As for tips for aspiring writers, read as much as you can – that’s the best way to learn. And write as much as you can too – regularly, and for its own sake, not just to try to publish. It’s an essential criterion for being a writer that you actually write. Also if you find a good editor, nail their feet to the floor and never let them out of your sight … they can help you make your stories sing.

TF: What are you currently working on? Will location be an important feature?

AH: I finished writing about Sydney (for The Body in the Clouds, my first novel) and Thirroul (for The Railwayman’s Wife) after we’d moved hundreds of miles north of both places … to Brisbane. When The Railwayman’s Wife was done, I said to my husband (whose job had brought us to the capital of Queensland in the first place) that I wanted to write a book about where I was for a change, and did he think we could sit still in Brisbane long enough for me to finish one? It’s set in Fairfield, the riverside piece of this city that we live in, and location is – again – very important to the plot. I think place has been important to pretty much everything I’ve written – in essays, in narrative non-fiction, and certainly in my novels and short stories. It always rises up like a character and makes a space for itself.

TF: When you travel, what is your choice of leisure reading?

AH: Anything from the teetering piles of unread books that sit like skyscrapers around my house; I promise myself at the beginning of each year that I won’t buy any new books until I’ve made a dint in the ones I haven’t read yet – and my resolve fails ten minutes’ later in the January sales.

The best match between a journey and a story that I’ve managed recently was reading Michelle de Kretser’s extraordinary Questions of Travel while I was away from home myself, and in Jordan of all exotic places. That gave an added punch to her wonderful meditations on our different ways and reasons for moving through the world.

Thank you to Ashley for her generous time in answering our questions. You can find out more about the author via her website

And if you would like more books set in Australia, then just click here to choose your next novel.

Tina and the TripFiction Team

ROME - a marriage of smoke and mirrors

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ICELAND - 'a foreign world'

Burial Rites by Hannah Kent set in ICELAND

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SAUDI ARABIA: a luminous portrait of life in the desert

1960s Saudi Arabia. Author Kim Barnes has phenomenally captured the feel of the Kingdom of that period, all set in the wider context of the political world stage. Women still haven't found a voice, even more so in the artificial life that is the compound of ex-pat life. This is a woman's life of drinks parties, filling time, secret drinnking and interminable boredom. But it's not enough for Mrs Gin McPhee.

Gin comes from a very poor background in Oklahoma and through her marriage to Mason her horizons broaden. They move to the Aramco processing facility in Abqaiq, Saudi Arabia (the plant and location are for real) and it is here she eventually finds her calling as a photographer. Although she clearly has talent, she is thwarted by censorship, which photos can and can't be published, and indeed some photos could ultimately lead to deportation. It is a risky business. Life is regulated for foreigners and particularly foreign women. Her husband spends many days away at the facility and so she socialises with other American women, and builds a friendship with one woman in particular, Ruthie, who shows her the ropes. She also builds relationships with her houseboy Yash, her husband's driver and an Italian photographer in an attempt to manage her bored frustration. These relationships are intriguing, although they seem to develop too easily and too quickly in this artificial world in the desert.

The novel starts like an airplane landing - it really hits the tarmac running - and then gradually taxis its way along the runway to its end, an ultimately rather unfulfilling conclusion. 


It is nevertheless rich in detail about life in the country and about ex-pat life in particular, some of which still holds true today. Nothing can sum up how  the locale is portrayed like the words of the author herself on her blog: Set against the gorgeously etched landscape of a country on the cusp of enormous change, In the Kingdom of Men abounds with sandstorms and locust swarms, shrimp pedlars, pearl divers, and Bedouin caravans - a luminous portrait of life in the desert.

And wherever in the world you pick up your copy of the book, the cover is a delightful reflection of the era of the late 1960s. A refreshing change from the more typical books set in Saudi Arabia, which loudly announce the setting through the prolific use of the niqab, a trifle formulaic, I feel. If Windmill Books (publishers of In the Kingdom of Men) can produce a simple, clear and lovely cover, so can other publishing houses.  We have brought together just a little collage to underpin this observation...

Tina and the TripFiction Team

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TripFiction's noteworthy books of 2013

Our top three reads of 2013

MIDWEST USA. 

"I haven’t read a more enthralling work this year." Read more here









MOROCCO

A good story that will bring this country to the reader, its red heat, its people, the cultural clashes and its fossils. Read more here including an interview with the author

KABUL/PARIS/SAN FRANCISCO/TINOS

Crossing generations and continents, moving from Kabul, to Paris, to San Francisco, to the Greek island of Tinos, with profound wisdom, depth, insight and compassion, Khaled Hosseini writes about the bonds that define us and shape our lives. Read more here





Our top book cover 2013

MARTHA'S VINEYARD 

We just loved the composition and colour of this book, so much so that we asked for a comment from the publisher's about how the cover came into being.

You can find our review and the story behind the cover here





Our most quirky reads of 2013

INDIA

Not the country as you or I know it! This is an intriguing peak into the Indian bedroom, both past and present, across the continent, and offers a marvellous insight into sexual mores and so much more. Our review here

MILAN 

Your marriage comes to an end. You find the courage to go and live in a new city in search of a new life. Not many people can claim to have done this. But this is the story of Marilyn who did just that. You can read our review here






The book cover that didn't match content 2013

NEW YORK 

A modern day take on what it means to live in New York from an outsider's perspective. Our review here








The book that really needed a proofreader 2013

WORLD STAGE

This is a well travelled novel that is in its own way a good storyline. But what let's it down is the proof reading and the cover - read more here







The book that lingered 2013

OXFORD & NEW YORK CITY

"The right cocktail of people, the perfect blend for calamity" Read more here 









The author interview that triumphed 2013

ZAMBIA

"A story of drama and culture, that transported me to Zambia" Read more here








And that was our year 2013 in books. Needless to say many books and novels have passed through our doors, many of which we would have loved to feature here. Next year for us will be exciting times, lots more books hitting the website and lots of new things coming on line (including a new-look website). Come and follow us on the journey via Twitter and Facebook. Have a great festive period and a good 2014! From Tony, Tina, Tom, Charlotte, Ann and Sandra.