Books to transport you...
...TO FIFTIES NEW JERSEY In The Unlikely Event, by Judy Blume (Picador, €10.99) The backdrop to Blume’s first adult novel in 17 years is a series of plane crashes that took place in her home town of Elizabeth, New Jersey, when she was a teenager. But its subject is life in Fifties America. A pleasure cruise of a novel. ...TO AMERICA’S DEEP SOUTH My Sunshine Away, by MO Walsh (Viking, €11.70) Coming of age, crime and teenage tragedy... The author effortlessly conjures up the hot, humid summers of Baton Rouge, Louisiana, in an intoxicating slice of steamy Southern Gothic. ...TO THE DORDOGNE Fatal Pursuit, by Martin Walker (Quercus, €18.25) The latest in the best-selling series featuring the police chief of a small town in the Dordogne sees Bruno Courreges caught up in a classic cars scam that is funding terrorism. The plot plays second fiddle to the evocative depictions of life in la France profonde and the mouthwatering descriptions of food and wine. The desolate Kent coast – an area teeming with birdlife – is the setting for this thriller, and loner police sergeant William South is keener on birdwatching than his fellow man. But when a neighbour is murdered, he begins an investigation that stirs up demons from his childhood in Northern Ireland. ...TO SEASIDE NORWAY The Strawberry Girl, by Lisa Stromme (Chatto & Windus, €16.99) It is 1893 and summer visitors throng the seaside village of Åsgårdstrand in Norway. Local girl Johanne starts work as a housemaid for artist Edvard Munch and finds herself a gobetween for an admiral’s daughter who is having a relationship with the painter – one that will inspire his masterpiece The Scream. A brilliantly lush and vivid novel. ...TO IMPERIAL ROME The Dictator, by Robert Harris (Arrow, €18.25) The third and final book in a brilliant trilogy about the Roman orator and politician, Cicero, it begins in 58BC with his return to Rome from exile. Robert Harris’s genius is to make the complexities of Roman politics and the realities of life in that turbulent, dynamic city of two millennia ago seem so immediate to his readers.