Sometimes, the setting of a novel can stay with you long after the details of the plot and characters have faded. My debut novel, The Lindens, was inspired by my grandmother’s home in the Wiltshire countryside where I grew up. As much as the house itself, I wanted to bring to life the land and nature around it: the garden and the orchard, the meadows and the woods, the plants and the birds and the changing seasons. I hope it’s a home that readers feel they can inhabit – just like the ones on this list.
From the famous opening dream sequence onwards, it’s impossible to come away from Rebecca without a vivid picture of Manderley in your mind.
Last summer, thanks to a fortuitous Airbnb mix-up, I ended up spending a holiday in a cottage on the Cornish estate where Daphne de Maurier lived, and which she used as the basis for Manderley. I can’t speak for the house itself, but I’m happy to report that the gardens – from the blue hydrangeas, to the rhododendrons and azaleas of Happy Valley, to the cove where Rebecca kept her boat – entirely lived up to what I’d imagined.
* 'The greatest psychological thriller of all time' ERIN KELLY * 'One of the most influential novels of the twentieth century' SARAH WATERS * 'It's the book every writer wishes they'd written' CLARE MACKINTOSH
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again . . .'
Working as a lady's companion, our heroine's outlook is bleak until, on a trip to the south of France, she meets a handsome widower whose proposal takes her by surprise. She accepts but, whisked from glamorous Monte Carlo to brooding Manderley, the new Mrs de Winter finds Max a changed man. And the memory…
Foxes’ Oven is a real house, hidden among the trees on the banks of the River Arun. It’s a few miles from where I live, and I walk by it from time to time.
Whenever I do, I’m reminded of this moving and evocative wartime tale, which has echoes of The Go-Between. Michael de Larrabeiti – best known for the Borribles trilogy, an urban fantasy cult classic – drew on his own experiences as an evacuee here, during World War Two, and the setting is beautifully brought to life.
The year is 1940 and Becky Taylor, a young evacuee from London, arrives at Foxes' Oven, a gloomy house in the hamlet of Offham, some two miles from the town of Arundel. There she begins a new life with Agnes Clemmer and her family. During the summer months Becky discovers happiness, a sense of belonging and even love. But there are secrets in Foxes' Oven and Becky also discovers, at first hand, passion, jealousy, betrayal and violence. The horrific events of those days are to haunt her for nearly half a century until, in her old age, hidden truths are…
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
Come for the oil paintings and the glass doors, stay for a tender and poignant portrait of family life. The Philadelphia mansion at the heart of this novel casts a spell over its characters – it’s the childhood home that Danny and Maeve have been banished from but are inexorably drawn back to.
Ann Patchett is one of my favourite contemporary novelists – few writers unpack their characters’ emotional baggage with such warmth, wit, and compassion.
Lose yourself in the story of a lifetime - the unforgettable Sunday Times bestseller
'Patchett leads us to a truth that feels like life rather than literature' Guardian
Nominated for the Women's Prize 2020
A STORY OF TWO SIBLINGS, THEIR CHILDHOOD HOME, AND A PAST THAT THEY CAN'T LET GO.
Like swallows, like salmon, we were the helpless captives of our migratory patterns. We pretended that what we had lost was the house, not our mother, not our father. We pretended that what we had lost had been taken from us by the person who still lived inside.
In the…
One of English literature’s great family sagas, this epic quintet follows three generations of the Cazalet family (plus various relatives, friends and servants) before, during and after the Second World War.
At its heart is Home Place, the sprawling family home in the Sussex countryside. Initially where the extended family gathers for idyllic summer holidays – all teas in the garden, playing with cousins, and dressing for dinner – it becomes a refuge as war closes in. The lives of the vast cast of characters are full of frustration, unhappiness and tragedy, but spending time with them is a joy.
The Light Years is a modern classic of twentieth-century English life in the countryside, and is the first novel in Elizabeth Jane Howard's extraordinary, bestselling family saga The Cazalet Chronicles.
Every summer, the Cazalet brothers - Hugh, Edward and Rupert - return to the family home in the heart of the Sussex countryside with their wives and children. There, they are joined by their parents and unmarried sister Rachel to enjoy two blissful months of picnics, games, and excursions to the coast. But despite the idyllic setting, nothing can be done to soothe the siblings' heartache: Hugh is haunted by…
Selected by Deesha Philyaw as winner of the AWP Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, Lake Song is set in the fictional town of Kinder Falls in New York’s Finger Lakes region. This novel in stories spans decades to plumb the complexities, violence, and compassion of small-town life as the…
I was tempted to pick the ever-welcoming Moominhouseas my final choice – Mooninvalley is a place I return to often – but in the end, I’ve gone for one of Tove Jansson’s real-world stories.
Based on her own family’s summer house, The Summer Book is set on an islet in the Gulf of Finland, and centres around the relationship between a six-year-old girl, Sophia, and her grandmother. Almost nothing happens – but the island is a world in itself, alive with so many tiny details.
Like Jansson’s Moomin stories, it’s a book you can keep coming back to and find new depths and wisdom each time.
In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia’s grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature…
The Lindens follows one house in the English countryside over the course of 150 years, from the 1890s to the near future. It weaves together the stories of the house’s inhabitants over the decades – tragic and comic, bittersweet and uplifting. We see how the house shapes the lives of its occupants, and how they in turn leave behind their mark and their memories.
It’s a novel about home and family, love and loss. About birds and trees, vengeful goats, mushroom trips and anarcho-syndicalist rabbits. About the passage of time, the circling of the seasons and the forks in the paths of our lives.
