Literary Places by Sarah Baxter

Literary Places by Sarah Baxter is an armchair guide to the key settings in twenty-five of the world’s greatest novels: Don Quixote, Persuasion, and The God of Small Things among them.

Warning: may inspire you to read more.

The chapters are short. Each is really an amuse-bouche aiming to momentarily transport us to Cairo, Kerala, Kabul; inspire us towards the original novel, and inform about the social and political context in which the author wrote and how this relates to the selected novel.

Well, it worked for me! After reading it, I happened to pass a secondhand bookshop and there was Joan Lindsay’s Picnic at Hanging Rock just gathering dust and spiders in the window! The overviews of Knut Hamsun’s Growth of the Soil set in the Norwegian wilds and Nadine Gordimer’s Burger’s Daughter from South Africa were also persuasive.

Though the sections open with a scene-setting narrative echoing the voice of the original works, what Literary Places lacks are excerpts from each novel demonstrating its evocations of place.

Written by Sarah Baxter and illustrated with a joyous minimalism by Amy Grimes, Literary Places is the second in the Inspired Traveller’s Guide series – preceded by Spiritual Places.

Many thanks to White Lion Publishing and NetGalley for the advanced reading copy.

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