Forget the guide book: Immerse yourself in these location-based novels

Irish Times

28-06-2025

ITALY
I always like to match my reading to my trips. I'm back with
Elena Ferrante
for an upcoming holiday in Naples, and loving the simmer of Italian heat, culture and family life throughout the Neapolitan Novels. As a long-term
EM Forster
fan, I'd say that A Room with a View is perfect for gorgeous first impressions on Florence, mixed with depth, humour and clandestine love.
Elizabeth Bowen
's Italian stories, scattered through the Collected Stories, are divine, full of boating on lakes and individualistic characters rubbing along badly. One of my favourite Bowen novels, The Hotel, is set on the Italian Riviera, and features her usual collection of snobs, maverick young ladies, odd encounters and stunning descriptions. Sharper than Forster, she conjures the light and leisure of Italian holidays perfectly.
Nuala O'Connor
Nuala O'Connor's latest novel is Seaborne (New Island)
An exceptional memoir of a year in Rome is
André Aciman
's My Roman Year. In 1966, teenager André was a refugee from Alexandria, a victim of President Nasser's campaign to 'Arabise' Egypt. He hates Rome initially, but gradually falls in love with the city, first with the historical centre, but also with the less picturesque parts – and with various Romans. With André you cycle around the city, you gasp at the sudden dramatic appearance of the Colosseum in the bus window, you savour the smell of bergamot. Even if you're not in the eternal city. But it would be wonderful to read it while there. Heading to Trieste? Nothing is better than
Jan Morris
's Trieste and the Meaning of Nowhere. All her travel books are brilliant.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne's latest book is Selected Stories (Blackstaff Press)
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UNITED STATES
Music-loving visitors to the United States will enjoy
Imani Perry
's Black in Blues, a remarkably beautiful book exploring black culture from Thelonius Monk to Toni Morrison.
Bob Dylan
's Chronicles: Volume One is not only the best book about Bob Dylan, it is the best book about New York. Other masterful evocations of the Apple include
Frank O'Hara
's Lunch Poems and
Patti Smith
's Just Kids. The United States' greatest wordsmiths have been songwriters, and most had immigrant roots. As your flight crosses the Atlantic, it would be lovely to listen to
Van Morrison
's stunning new album, Remembering Now, a moving and thrilling memoir that unfurls into glorious life the soul, blues, jazz and gospel that have been the United States' richest artistic gifts, the soundtrack of its better angels.
Joseph O'Connor
Joseph O'Connor's latest novel is The Ghosts of Rome (Harvill Secker)
NETHERLANDS
I became a fan of
Gerbrand Bakker
when I read The Twin about 10 years ago. His new novel The Hairdresser's Son (also translated by David Colmer) examines loneliness and grief as quiet-living Simon puzzles over the long-standing mystery of his father's disappearance.
William Golding's
The Lord of the Flies regularly appears on '100 best books' lists, and for its 70th anniversary, in 2024, the Dutch illustrator and author Aimée de Jongh reimagined it as a beautiful and evocative graphic novel. De Jongh's version celebrates the original text yet is also entirely original and fresh. Set in the Dutch countryside in 1961,
Yael van der Wouden
's Women's Prize-winning debut,
The Safekeep
, is both a psychological thriller and love story, a marvellously unsettling portrait of desire, possessiveness and the creep of obsession.
Henrietta McKervey
Henrietta McKervey's latest novel is A Talented Man (Hachette Books Ireland)
FRANCE
The writing of the Nobel laureate
Annie Ernaux
tracks her experiences as a working-class woman and offers a more prosaic version of France than we are used to. Try Happening to begin with.
Leila Slimani
's Goncourt-winning Lullaby was a shocking novel about a nanny who kills the children in her care, but it also examines the Parisian bourgeoisie, class divisions and the dilemma of domestic labour in the age of equality.
Hervé Le Tellier
's The Anomaly is a mind-bending speculative mystery that sees a planeful of people duplicated during a storm. Le Tellier explores the different paths the duplicate characters' lives take, and what it might mean. This too won the Prix Goncourt. Finally, the crime writer
Clémence Michallon
's The Quiet Tenant is a psychological thriller about a woman held captive by a serial killer.
Edel Coffey
Edel Coffey's latest novel is In Her Place (Sphere)
PORTUGAL
José Saramago
's career can be roughly divided into pre-Nobel, when his novels intimately examined Portuguese history, and post-Nobel, when they evolved into less geographically specific parables. His sole work of nonfiction, Journey to Portugal, translated by Amanda Hopkinson and Nick Caistor,
is a fine meditative travelogue set in post-Salazar Portugal in 1979. The other giant of contemporary Portuguese literature is
António Lobo Antunes
. A trained psychiatrist who spent three years as an army medic in the colonial war in Angola, Lobo Antunes is one of literature's greatest living stylists, a radiographer of late-20th century Portugal, especially the messy reflux of decolonisation. A good starting point is his 1988 novel, The Return of the Caravels, translated by Gregory Rabassa.
Fernando Pessoa
's 'autobiography without facts', The Book of Disquiet,
translated by Richard Zenith, might be a hackneyed suggestion, but few books capture the essence of a city for a visitor so well as it does of Lisbon.
Oliver Farry
Oliver Farry is a foreign correspondent and book reviewer
CROATIA
I firmly believe that, had she not died in 2018,
Dasa Drndic
would feature in the Nobel conversation today. Monumental novels such as Trieste (translated by Ellen Elias Bursac), Belladonna and EEG (translated by Celia Hawkesworth) encapsulate so much about personal and European history in the 20th century and resonate loudly today. Exciting younger writers have also broken through.
Tea Tulic
's debut novel, Hair Everywhere, translated by Coral Petkovich, is surprising and tender in depicting a family upended by cancer.
Olja Savicevic
has had two excellent novels translated into English: Farewell, Cowboy and Singer in the Night (both translated by Celia Hawkesworth). Those looking to lose themselves in an epic historical family saga should certainly look out for The Brass Age by
Slobodan Snajder
(also translated by Celia Hawkesworth).
Rónán Hession
Rónán Hession's latest novel is Ghost Mountain (Bluemoose)
SPAIN
Spain is associated with light, colour and the pleasures of the palate. It is also a country that suffered a devastating civil war in the 20th century and decades of dictatorship. The tensions and legacies from that period are still present in contemporary Spanish society.
Javier Marías
, who died in 2022, was one of the most perceptive and able chroniclers of the deep divisions in Spain that resulted from the brutal repression and all-pervasive surveillance of the fascist years. In novels such as The Infatuations (2013), Thus Bad Begins (2016), Berta Isla (2018) and Tomás Nevinson (2021), Marías offers a forensic exploration of how a society is indelibly marked by political violence and by the consequent temptations of compliance and betrayal. One of the enduring delights of Marías's writing is his utterly distinctive voice, which at once draws the reader into his sensitive and richly detailed description of his home country.
Michael Cronin
Michael Cronin is professor of French at Trinity College Dublin
For Lanzarote, you could do much worse than grab
Margaret Drabble
's The Dark Flood Rises, which is largely set on that island.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
GREECE
I recently researched a novel set in Greece that I didn't write, so I have ideas, with the caveat that these are anglophone books about living in Greece rather than Greek literature in translation.
Sofka Zinovieff
's Eurydice Street is an attentive, observant account of moving to Athens with a young family.
Charmian Clift
's two memoirs, Mermaid Singing and Peel Me a Lotus, will take you to Hydra in the 1960s with Leonard Cohen passing through.
Patrick Leigh Fermor
's Letters invite you to a bohemian English villa, under construction and then hosting European artists and writers, in postwar Kardamyli. And of course there are the Durrell brothers – Lawrence for preference.
Sarah Moss
Sarah Moss's latest novel is Ripeness (Picador)
MALTA
Brian Blouet
's The Story of Malta (Ninth Edition), first published in 1967, remains the best introduction to the intriguing history of this country, from the wonders of its neolithic temples to its successive colonisation by different groups, most famously the Knights of St John, who defended it from the Ottomans in a famous 1565 siege. Blouet, coincidentally a neighbour of mine when I was growing up, first came to Malta as an RAF pilot in the 1950s, when it was still part of the British Empire. Malta might not be the first place that comes to mind when you think of queer history, but Beloved Malta: Stories of Sexual and Gender Identity offers a riveting alternative history of the country that is ironically enabled by the immaculate records kept by the Knights of St John. Today Malta is one of the most LGBTQ-friendly countries in the world despite the persistent influence of the Catholic Church.
Daniel Geary
Daniel Geary is professor of American history at Trinity College Dublin
MEXICO
I loved You Dreamed of Empires by
Álvaro Enrigue
, translated by Natasha Wimmer. It's zippy and humid, which makes it ideal for when the sun is getting to you. The twists and turns of its paragraphs and sentences mimic not just the palaces where its characters – Cortés, Moctezuma and a cohort of conquistadores having a bad trip – find themselves lost but also the dreamy unfurling of the alternative history that it narrates. I won't spoil what happens, but if you read it on holidays in Mexico you'll look up from the end of it with a heartbroken ache at what you see around you. 'Plot twist' doesn't cover it: it's more enigmatic than that – a wrenching of the mood, maybe. Really quite something. Might ruin the holiday, albeit in a fruitful way.
Tim MacGabhann
Tim MacGabhann's latest book is The Black Pool: A Memoir of Forgetting (Sceptre)
AUSTRALIA
In case we begin to believe that Australia is a country with a few big cities let us remind ourselves that it is a continent only slightly smaller than Europe, so clearly a few books won't cover it. But it is far away, so if you're undergoing the journey, you can read many books. I'd suggest The Fatal Shore by
Robert Hughes
for a drenching in essential history, and True Stories, or Everywhere I Look, by
Helen Garner
, one of Australia's great essayists – and there are many. I've said before that her work is put together with sentences that begin on the low ground but rise into expressions of joy, marvellous pictures as clear as a well-dusted photo album. I'd pack any anthology of short stories, because they have the capacity to illuminate in shades; be sure they include some of the more modern work, including those of First Nations voices. In fact, sorting books for the journey – did I say long journey? – is part of the pleasure. Include some poetry; that's for somewhere over the ocean spread, when you've asked yourself 'Why am I here?' while realising that, all things considered, it does make sense to travel to Australia by ship. You could then have Jon Cleary for dessert. Although not considered a literary gem, his Scobie Malone thrillers give a well-crafted glimpse into suburban Australian life, its concerns and foibles.
Evelyn Conlon
Evelyn Conlon's latest book is After the Train: Irishwomen United and a Network of Change (UCD Press), edited with Rebecca Pelan
BULGARIA
Usually when I visit a country I like to read some of its classic works. If you're heading to the Black Sea, why not read
Ivan Vazov
's Under the Yoke, a passionate, rather sentimental novel about the Bulgarian fight for freedom in the late 19th century? You'll get it on your ereader. And the contemporary writer
Georgi Gospodinov
's The Physics of Sorrow will give you an insight into more recent times in that intriguing country.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne
TURKEY
'From a very young age, I suspected there was more to my world than I could see: somewhere in the streets of Istanbul, in a house resembling ours, there lived another Orhan so much like me that he could pass for my twin, even my double.' So begins
Orhan Pamuk
's Istanbul: Memories and the City, translated by Maureen Freely, an enchanting memoir that's both scholarly and confessional. Drawing on a broad range of writers, from Baudelaire to Resat Ekrem Kocu, Pamuk evokes the city's complex history and politics, its derelict grandeur and collective melancholy – hüzün – weaving in his own coming-of-age story amid Istanbul's post-imperial decay.
Ruby Eastwood
Ruby Eastwood is a postgraduate student at Trinity College Dublin and a book reviewer