The Town of Rye (02/17)
The charming town of Rye rests in the county of East Sussex near England's south coast. Rye's recorded history can be traced back to before the Norman Conquest of 1066. For many centuries it was an important port town set in a naturally formed bay. But this changed in the 13th century when a combination of major storms led to its main ...
Vikings on the Isle of Man (02/17)
One of the main storylines of Merrow involves the arrival of a man, Ulf, who Auntie Ushag, using her native Manx language, calls a 'wiggynagh,' or what we'd call a Viking. Like many elements of the novel, this has a basis in historical fact, since the Isle of Man has a significant history of Viking exploration and settlement.
...
Vikings on the Isle of Man (02/17)
One of the main storylines of Merrow involves the arrival of a man, Ulf, who Auntie Ushag, using her native Manx language, calls a 'wiggynagh,' or what we'd call a Viking. Like many elements of the novel, this has a basis in historical fact, since the Isle of Man has a significant history of Viking exploration and settlement.
...
The Maze Prison and Its Most Famous Inmate (02/17)
In
High Dive, Jonathan Lee references many aspects of '
The Troubles,' a term used to describe the turbulent decades in Northern Ireland between 1960 and 2000. At issue was a territorial challenge: the overwhelmingly Protestant Loyalists wanted to remain part of the United Kingdom while the nationalists and mainly Catholic republicans were...
The Kung Tribe (02/17)
Africa's Kalahari desert might seem an unlikely model for American society. But the Kalahari—a sparsely populated swath of sun-baked bushland that boasts temperatures regularly above 100 degrees during the day and just a few inches of rainfall every year—is home to a tribe of nomadic people called the Kung (part of the San ...
Internment Camp Newspapers (02/17)
In Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds, Harry Fukuhara, his sister Mary, and his niece Jeanie were forced into internment camps built to house people of Japanese descent who were living in the United States during World War II. Over 127,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the West Coast where ...
What is Jihad? (01/17)
In The Kindness of Enemies, Leila Aboulela's twenty-first century protagonist Natalie asks: 'How did this historical change in the very definition of jihad come about?' This question is developed thematically though the historical storyline in Aboulela's novel which features Imam Shamil, a mid-nineteenth century Muslim leader of mountain...
Apex, North Carolina - One of the Best Places to Live in America (01/17)
When Dr. Clarice Watkins sets out to academically scrutinize one of the 'Best Places to Live in America,' she notes that the criteria for making the list include 'Good quality of life,' along with 'Quiet and safe.' For many years, Money magazine has compiled its own annual roundups of the 'Best Places to Live.' According to Money, their ...
The Farallon Islands (01/17)
The Lightkeepers is set on the Farallon Islands, which are officially part of the city of San Francisco. Even though they are located just about thirty miles west of the Golden Gate Bridge, the islands are quite remote. 'There is nowhere more alone than the Farallon Islands,' Geni writes in The Lightkeepers, 'The rest of the world might ...
A Brief Recent History of Belarus (12/16)
The Invisible Life of Ivan Isaenko deals with the aftermath of Chernobyl and is set in a hospital in Belarus.
While most of us think of Belarus as a part of the now fragmented Soviet Union, the country has a colorful history of being handed back and forth between Poland and Russia for centuries. Belarus was part of Poland (which ...
The Hotel Metropol (12/16)
In
A Gentleman in Moscow, Count Alexander Ilyich Rostov is sentenced to live the rest of his life within the walls of his current residence – Moscow's
Hotel Metropol.
One of the oldest hotels in Russia, the Metropol was originally named the Chelyshy after its owner, Pyotr Chelyshev, who opened the facility as a bath house and ...
The Tomb of the Unknown Soldier (11/16)
When English clergyman Reverend David Railton spied a British grave marked 'Unmarked British Soldier' in 1916, he developed the idea for a national war memorial. It would take until 1920, however, for his idea to come to fruition, but this proved to be the perfect time. Two years after the end of World War I there were still tens of ...
Bat Mitzvah (11/16)
One of the stories in Robert Oldshue's November Storm is about a 12-year old girl who is about to become a Bat Mitzvah. Most people have heard of a Bar or Bat Mitzvah – a Jewish rite of passage; a time when boys and girls are formally welcomed into the adult community. The word mitzvah means commandment or law, as well as good deed; ...
The Hokule'a (11/16)
In
Pacific, author Simon Winchester closes with the image of the vessel
Hokule'a, which he views as a symbol of hope for the people of the Pacific Islands and a physical manifestation of a return of respect for indigenous traditions.
The Hokule'a is built in the tradition of the ancient Hawaiian double-hulled voyaging canoe known as
wa...
The Tridevi in Hinduism (10/16)
The Opposite of Everyone is peppered with elements from Hinduism, most prominently with references to the goddess Kali who is widely revered among Hindus for her ability to quell chaos during dark times (read '
Beyond the Book' for
The Strangler Vine to learn more about Kali).
According to the tenets of Hinduism, the Supreme Being ...
Cyprus: Divided Loyalties (10/16)
One of the many historical events that are featured glancingly in A Strangeness in My Mind is the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus.
For a long time Cyprus was a part of the Ottoman Empire, which arguably explains why Turkey considered it its own, even after the Ottoman Empire handed over governance of the island to Great Britain in ...
Anegada - BVI (10/16)
Set on the remote British Virgin Island (BVI) of Anegada,
Sun, Sand, Murder is a mystery novel that owes much to its setting.
Anegada is the northernmost island of the BVI archipelago chain (click map for larger image). Of the inhabited islands, Anegada is the only one made of coral and limestone, instead of being volcano-created like...
Hollywood's Margaret Herrick Library (09/16)
If you live in or near Los Angeles, you're guaranteed to have at least one Hollywood experience, be it a TV show taping, a star sighting, tickets to a premiere, or some crazy confluence of circumstances that gives you something you never expected.
Up until late summer 2012, I lived in the Santa Clarita Valley, 30 minutes north of ...
The Kibbutz (08/16)
Atwood's experimental Positron/Consilience project in The Heart Goes Last shares many similarities with the kibbutz movement in Israel, which began in the early 20th century as a way for Jews to develop and settle the land.
The basic philosophy behind the kibbutz embodied Karl Marx's maxim: 'from each according to his ability, to each ...
Pulau Bidong Refugee Camp (08/16)
In Dragonfish, Suzy writes about leaving Vietnam with her daughter, and arriving on an island before finally being resettled in the United States. She was one of many boat people, and this aspect of the story might well be modeled after Vu Tran's real-life experiences where he and most of his family were refugees at Pulau Bidong ...
Kibera (08/16)
Kibera, in Nairobi, Kenya, is one of the largest slums in the world; in Africa, it is second only to South Africa's Soweto, with a population of anywhere from 200,000 to over a million depending on who is doing the measuring. Early in
Find Me Unafraid, Jessica Posner writes:
In Kibera, hundreds of thousands of houses made from ...
Hampstead Heath (08/16)
After his wife's death in Owen Sheers novel I Saw a Man, Michael Turner moves from their home in Coed y Bryn in Wales to a flat in London owned by the very friend that informed him of Caroline's death. While he is reluctant to do much of anything after her death, he knows he must inch himself forward and the noncommittal ...
Mnemosyne, the Mother of the Muses (07/16)
The title of Jonathan Galassi's novel Muse, refers to the fictional poet that the story centers on, Ida Perkins, who provides inspiration to the literary world.
A set of Ida's narrative poems is titled 'Mnemosyne,' whom Paul quickly recognizes as 'the Titaness Mnemosyne, goddess of memory and mother of the Muses.' The powerful ...
Two Haunted Houses in England (07/16)
You might not find Slade House in the real world, but England, where the novel is set, boasts of haunted houses with their own sinister histories. Here are two of them.
The Borley Rectory
The rectory in the village of Borley in Essex was built in the 1860s for the Reverend Henry Dawson Ellis Bull. After his death in 1892 his ...
The Synagogue Made With Molasses (07/16)
Much of The Marriage of Opposites is set in the town of Charlotte Amalie, St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands, and concerns the main characters' Jewish heritage and traditions.
The Virgin Islands were 'discovered' by Christopher Columbus on his second voyage in 1493. Many European explorers visited the islands in the ensuing decades and ...
A Tour of New York Public Libraries (05/16)
At the beginning of chapter 2 of
Murder at the 42nd Street Library, Con Lehane describes the New York Public Library's famed 42nd Street branch thusly:
The 42nd Street Library stretches along the west side of Fifth Avenue from 42nd to 40th Street. The landmark beaux arts structure houses the humanities and social sciences ...
Reincarnation and the Dalai Lamas (05/16)
Susan Barker's The Incarnations explores the five lives of one man who, in his present life, is a taxi driver in Beijing. The highest-profile example of reincarnation is that of the Dalai Lamas in Tibet – 14 in all, so far. The Dalai Lamas come from the Yellow Hat Sect of Tibetan Buddhists, which was founded in the late 14th century...
Coney Island Amusements (05/16)
Coney Island, Brooklyn has long been known as a seaside vacation destination. As early as the 1830s, it was a retreat for New York City workers, and its attraction grew as it became more accessible by train, streetcar, and steamboat. Between the 1880s and World War II, Coney Island was the nation's foremost leisure area, with three large ...
The Norwegian Seamen's Church (05/16)
At several points in Per Petterson's I Refuse, two different characters find themselves feeling lonely while in Singapore. One character says she begins to feel a 'certain weariness inside, a reluctance to speak English and nothing else for a long time to come' and decides to head to the Norwegian Seamen's Church, which is not ...
Afghan Women's Writing Project (05/16)
When the Moon is Low has Fereiba narrate much of the action as she flees Afghanistan, along with her children, for refuge in England. While Fereiba's story is one of escape, there are countless women left behind who must endure daily life in a country where the Taliban's extremely stifling laws leave a suffocating footprint.
The
Afghan...
Swiss-German (04/16)
Switzerland has four official languages, each primarily spoken in different regions of the country (please click map below). A portion of the West speaks primarily French; Italian dominates in some portions of the South; and Romansh, the closest living language resembling ancient Latin, works in a very small section of the southeast. A ...
Detroit's Property Crash and the Road to Recovery (04/16)
In 2013, the city of Detroit declared bankruptcy. The decline of the automotive industry, the growth of the suburbs, unemployment, poverty, and high crime rate are all cited as factors in the city's decline. From a peak population of 1.85 million in 1950, the city shrank to around 700,000; it steadily leaked people to the Michigan suburbs...
Modern Day Miracles? (03/16)
Andrew Roe's The Miracle Girl follows the life of Anabelle Vincent, a comatose girl who many believe grants miracles. Of course, there are skeptics who surround the young Anabelle, too, and so the novel asks readers to question whether they are believers or skeptics.
The occurrence of alleged miracles is, of course, not a new topic. ...
What is it Like to Live in Jerusalem? (03/16)
Most of the action of Joinson's novel, The Photographer's Wife, takes place in Jerusalem. Just the name suggests so much. Known as the seat of three major religions, it has gone by the names the City of David, the City of Peace, and even the Holy City. It is also the city that I've called my home for over 30 years. Joinson's book notes ...
The Goddess Kali (03/16)
In The Strangler Vine, a nomadic tribe of Indian bandits, known to history as Thugs, first charm and then strangle fellow travelers in the name of the Hindu goddess Kali. The appropriation of Kali by the Thuggee to justify their murders is the subject of some ongoing historical debate. While Kali is a Hindu goddess, it has been argued ...
Beyond the Book: Orality, Politics, and the Evolution of Nigerian Literature (02/16)
E. C. Osondu's debut novel, This House Is Not For Sale, is rooted in Nigerian oral tradition. Orality, the transmission of thought and idea through speech, was the primary method of communication before the advent of the written word. In West Africa, this function falls to the griot, a singer, storyteller, and musician who serves as ...
Shenzhen, a Special Economic Zone (02/16)
One of the key elements of Whispering Shadows features Westerners conducting business in China, in particular in Hong Kong and the Special Economic Zone of Shenzhen about 20 miles north of Hong Kong.
Before being anointed as the first Special Economic Zone (SEZ) by then premier Deng Xiaoping in 1980, Shenzhen was an idyllic fishing...
The Lighthouse of Alexandria (02/16)
In Light, author Bruce Watson references the Lighthouse of Alexandria as one of the first instances where light was used in a large-scale manner for a practical purpose.
Alexander the Great built the city of Alexandria, Egypt, on the coast of the Mediterranean Sea in 331 BCE, and as part of the subsequent construction had a stone ...
The Day of The Dead (01/16)
Leigh was born on November 1. The day following Halloween is known as All Saints Day. In Mexico, where Dario, her friend the gravedigger is from, it is also known as Dias de Los Muertos — The Day of the Dead. On Leah's fifteenth birthday, and the first day they meet, Dario gives her a tiny clay skeleton, La Catrina, the patron saint...
Made in Greece (01/16)
In choosing to set Outline in Athens, Rachel Cusk is the latest in a long line of authors, poets and playwrights who have gravitated toward or drawn inspiration from Greece - its geography, its history and its vast canon of ancient writings.
The tradition of Grecian influence on literature began over two thousand years ago when the ...
Animal Ark in Reno, Nevada (01/16)
In the acknowledgments section at the end of
The Animals, Christian Kiefer reveals that the inspiration for Bill Reed's North Idaho Wildlife Rescue came partially from
Animal Ark in Reno, Nevada. Opened in 1981, Animal Ark provides a haven for injured and abandoned animals that, for whatever reason, cannot be released back into the wild. ...
The Soviet Union's Uranium Gulags (01/16)
In Oblivion, the unnamed narrator travels to the abandoned uranimum mines on the outer edges of the Siberian taiga to discover the truth about Grandfather II, a family friend who played an important role in his upbringing.
In the race for the atomic bomb in the lead up to World War II, the Allies had effectively secured most of the ...
The Tenement Museum (01/16)
Like many immigrant families in New York at the turn of the 20th century, Clara and her family lived in a tenement very much like the one preserved and recreated at the Tenement Museum in Manhattan's Lower East Side, a National Historic Site run by the National Park Service. This five-story brick building on Orchard Street was built in ...
Congo and Dirty Minerals (11/15)
In The Laughing Monsters, Denis Johnson shows that Africa has been exploited for minerals for a good long time. 'This time we concern ourselves with metals and minerals,' points out the main character, Roland Nair, trying to explain his mission that takes him from Sierra Leone to Congo.
The Democratic Republic of the Congo is ...
North Korea's Pyongyang University of Science & Technology (11/15)
Dr. Kim Chin-Kyung (aka Kim Jin Kyong, James Kim) is the founder of both the Pyongyang University of Science and Technology (PUST) and its older sister institution, the Yanbian University of Science and Technology (YUST) in China. It is at PUST that Suki Kim worked on assignment as an English teacher.
Born in 1935 in Seoul, Kim was a ...
Brookline: Boston's Streetcar Suburb (10/15)
Many of the stories in Honeydew are set in the town of Godolphin, an imaginary suburb of Boston that bears a great deal of resemblance to Pearlman's home town of Brookline.
Brookline, first settled in 1638 and incorporated as an independent town in 1705, is what's commonly known as a 'streetcar suburb,' a residential community ...
The Shower Posse (10/15)
A Brief History of Seven Killings chronicles the rise of a Jamaican drug gang in the United States. This fictional organization seems to be loosely modeled after the real-life Shower Posse, a violent Jamaican gang linked with numerous killings, with strongholds in large American cities such as New York and Miami.
The origins of the ...
Saint-Pierre and Miquelon (10/15)
At one point in the novel, Moses Sweetland travels to a nearby island to stock up on supplies. While there, he is questioned by the French authorities and asked for his passport. Readers might do a double-take when they read this section — the island in question is only a few miles off the coast of Newfoundland, after all — ...
The Mütter Museum (10/15)
The author of
Dr. Mütter's Marvels, Cristin O'Keefe Aptowicz, has said that the inspiration for her book came from a school field trip taken to Philadelphia's
Mütter Museum. The museum got its start when the surgeon bequeathed a collection of interesting anatomical specimens to the College of Physicians with a ...
The Hỏa Lò Prison (09/15)
Who would have ever guessed that Hỏa Lò, the notorious Vietnamese prison compound derisively dubbed the 'Hanoi Hilton' would become a tourist attraction? But that's what's happened, and the ironic, even troubling transition from a place of torture to a ticket-selling tourist trap provides the backdrop for David Freed's mystery ...
