Stephen King
My wife and I now go to Florida in the winter. We live in a small town on the
west coast not far from Sarasota. This is the same area where John
D.MacDonald lived, and I have been reading my way through his standalone
novels while we’re down there. It's amazing how relevant and lively these
books remain, although most were published in the 1950s and early 1960.
It’s important for me to read these wonderful old stories in situ, because
all the places are still there, although now overlaid with half a century’s
growth. It’s interesting to see that many of MacDonald’s gloomy social
predictions have come true, and even more fun to observe his quick-sketch
social archetypes, from the hustling realtors to the shuffling, sun-seeking
oldsters, still all present and accounted for. And of course the geography
is the same. Seeing it through MacDonald’s eyes refreshes it for my own.
Stephen King’s Lisey’s Story is published by Hodder at £17.99
Marina Lewycka
While visiting Connemara in 2005 I read Joseph O’Connor’s brilliant Star of
the Sea, named after the ship which carried the starving Irish families,
expelled from their famine-struck smallholdings, to a new life in America.
We stayed near Leenaun, walked around the sombre Twelve Bens and along
Killary Harbour, a dark cut of water between steep heath-covered slopes. I
was struck by the bleakness and emptiness of the countryside, and when I
read Joseph O’Connor, I understood why.
This land was the heart of the clearances, where between 1847-1856 thousands
of families, unable to pay the rents the English landowners demanded, were
thrown out of their homes and abandoned to starve on the roadsides. This
landscape was their memorial. From time to time we would come across a pile
of stones where a cottage had once stood.
In the evenings, our landlady lit a fire in the drawing room, and served us
tea and scones. Her Bed and Breakfast business was partly supported by a
European Union tourism initiative, and she was up-beat about the future. "You
have to know about the past," she said, "but you can't go on
hating people through generations. This is a good place to live now."
Marina Lewycka’s Two Caravans is published by Fig Tree at £16.99
Simon Kernick
No one would ever call Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s 1958 novel, The Pledge, a
holiday read. But then, no one would ever call the killing fields of
Cambodia a holiday — at least not in the conventional sense. I was in Phnom
Penh earlier this year to research a thriller I was intending to write, and
by chance, The Pledge was one of the books I brought with me. In essence,
it’s the story of a detective who promises the mother of a murdered child
that he will bring her killer to justice, and whose obsessive quest to
fulfil that pledge ruins his life. The setting is rural Switzerland just
after the war, a beautiful and tranquil oasis of forests and villages, where
farmers still till the fields by hand and children are free to roam.
Phnom Penh too is a beautiful place. Tiny by Asian standards, with barely a
million people, and nestled on the banks of the mighty Mekong River, you can
walk across it in the space of a couple of hours. It buzzes with life, and
there’s much to see: magnificent French colonial architecture, tree-fringed
parks, and some of the most stunning Buddhist temples in Asia.
