Searching for Place

LUCY BURDETTE: You know that Key West as a place is important to me both because we live there half a year and because it’s the setting for my series. (The Mango Murders, number 15, coming to a bookstore near you on August 12!) I like nothing better than hearing from a reader about how much they enjoy visiting Key West vicariously or, how they have literally traveled in Hayley Snow’s footsteps, eating what she’s eaten, stopping to admire places she’s been.

Lorenzo and Dominique the cat man at Mallory Square

I travel this way as a reader myself. Sometimes I adore a book or series so much that I must travel there. You might remember this happened with Shetland, because of Ann Cleeves’ Jimmy Perez series.

At the end of May, John and I traveled to France for our vacation/anniversary. Yes, we went to my beloved Paris, but we first spent three days in Saint-Malo, a tiny peninsula on the north coast of Brittany. Once I knew we were going, I determined to read All the Light You Cannot See, which had been languishing on my bedside table forever. This walled city was bombed by the allies at the end of World War II, both in the book and the movie, and in reality. It has since been rebuilt, almost every stone put back in place, so that you can imagine what it looked like in the early 1940s. I could imagine the main character Marie Laure’s life as we walked the bumpy cobblestones of the old streets.

Here’s a bakery at approximately the place she visited over the course of the book carrying messages to and from the resistance.

Here is the path to the island that’s underwater at high tide where she loved to escape.

St Malo from across the bay…

Have you traveled to a place because you read about it in a novel? Are there places you’re longing to go (real or fictional) after reading about them?