Winter Bookish Blog Hop – A Book Set in a Place You’ve Lived

Today’s topic is : a book set in a place you’ve lived

My first instinct was to talk about a book set in London, because, well… There’s like a million of them out there to choose from! But then I thought that would be too easy, and decided to go with Switzerland.

The Last by Hannah Jameson is set in a Hotel somewhere in Switzerland, where a group of 20 strangers are stranded after nuclear war breaks out. Things get even more complicated with the body of a young girl in found in the hotel’s water tank, and the group realises they are trapped in with a murderer.

I quite enjoyed The Last, whose story is told through the journal of one of the hotel’s stranded guests. It’s an enjoyable take on the post-apocalyptic theme, and despite it’s subject matter, it does not come across as bleak. It’s portrayal of the survivors banding together despite the tensions between them paints human nature in a good light, something that doesn’t happen often in post-apocalyptic fiction.

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Here’s what our bookish friends had to say!

Danielle at Snatched Words

‘How To Find Home’ by Mahsuda Snaith is set in Nottingham, where I went to university. The lead character of the book is Molly, who lives on the streets of Nottingham. We join Molly as she meets Luca, who invites her along on his quest to find a fortune in Skegness. Molly’s friend, Jules, also tags along and the book follows their journey to the seaside town. Like any good road trip story, it’s both a literal and personal development journey. The glimpses around Nottingham brought back lots of memories of a city that I haven’t been to for a while, but that will always have a little place in my heart.

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Becki at A Book Lover’s Adventures

Several years ago I lived in Colorado. Three of Stephen King’s more popular (and scary) books are set in Colorado. The Stand is set in Boulder, The Shining is set in Estes Park and Misery is set in the fictitious mountain town of Sidewinder, Colorado! I am not particularly a fan of scary books, so these are beyond my level, but my husband (who I met in Colorado) loves Stephen King and these three books are some of his favorites!

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Valerie, at Cats Luv Coffee

I grew in Roanoke, Virginia. It’s a big little city, big in terms of people yet somehow everyone knows someone you know. It’s rare to find it as a setting in books. If people set books in Virginia, it’s usually Richmond or Williamsburg. That’s why it was super surprising to read Black Box, Inc. by Jake Bible and see little ‘ol Roanoke listed as a stopping point in their journey. 

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Kim J at Writer Side of Life

In 2015, my family spent a year in France. My very favourite book set in France is All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr, because I love the beautiful descriptions of Brittany in World War 2. It is the story of a blind French girl and a German boy, negotiating childhood during wartime.

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Leslie Conzatti at Upstream Writer

Well, I’ve lived in only one place my whole life: Vancouver, WA–so the number of books I’ve actually read that are set in this place is kind of limited. BUT there is one that I read recently, and I’m excited to share about it!
It’s called Time Tree: The Emergence by newly-minted author Lisa Rae Morris, who also happens to be a very dear friend of mine! I still remember the day she started describing the story like “I have this really strange story about a young woman who goes to work at a nursing home and finds out that one of the residents is actually a man about her own age who time-traveled to the present from a past era, and ended up in the body of an eighty-year-old man, but in his mind he believes he’s twenty-something, and she’s gotta figure out what brought him there, and how to get him back to his own time…” And I was like OMG PLEASE WRITE THIS I NEED IT YOU HAVE NO IDEA! She started it, put it on hold to write a nonfiction “couples help” guide, then finally got back to it and finished it–and I couldn’t be happier! If the description above intrigued you at all, let me just add that the man in question time-travels from eighteenth-century Scotland–and the whole thing is not bogged down by a forced romance between Modern Girl and Vintage Man… Each of them already have their own love interests in their own time periods, and it’s wonderful to see the friendship develop between them as they get to the heart of the mystery and figure out how to put everything back to rights! ESPECIALLY if you really like Diana Gabaldon’s Outlander but you’re also in the mood for something clean to read–this is it! It feels really good to have a book that’s actually set, not in a popular city in my state but actually in my hometown. I wrote a review on my blog for it here.

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Check out Upstream Writer for tomorrow’s topic!