Ten of the Best books about other places 10


Whether you are going away this summer, or enjoying a staycation, which are the best books to transport you to another place? Daniel Hahn chooses.


I should begin by saying that my ten books have very little in common. They’re mostly very recent, and they all take place ‘elsewhere’ – that is, not in my own particular world (Brighton seafront, July 2015) – but that’s about it. Some I’ve chosen because the writers themselves are from other countries, writing in other languages. Others are British writers but writing about places that aren’t their own. Some I’ve chosen because their sense of that elsewhere is so remarkably conveyed, while some I’ve chosen for almost exactly the opposite reason – a great story which happens to be set in X but could just as easily be in Y, or in Z, or for that matter on the Brighton seafront, and it’s precisely that fact, that a kid is a kid, a family is a family, universally wherever you are, that appeals to me.


The Invention of Hugo Cabret Brian Selznick, Scholastic, 978-1407103488, £14.99 hbk I’ll start just over the water from here, with two French books – or rather, two books of France – one written by an American, one anonymously. My first is Brian Selznick’s beautiful The Invention of Hugo Cabret, set in the Paris of the 1930s. Selznick uses words and pictures to tell a story in an original and utterly effective way (the story is told sometimes only in text, sometimes only in images, never together); it’s about cinema, and about automata, and other irresistible things, and Paris herself looms large, too, in this engrossing, thrilling story.


Line of Fire Barroux, trans Sarah Ardizzone, Phoenix Yard Books, 978-1907912399, £10.99 pbk


Next is both a newer story and an older one… When illustrator Barroux found a cardboard box in a skip near his Paris home, he had no idea what it might contain. What he found was an old notebook, which turned out to be the diary of a soldier, describing his experiences in the early months of the First World War. With Barroux’s illustrations, the diary became On Les Aura, published in English in Sarah Ardizzone’s translation as Line of


4 Books for Keeps No.213 July 2015


Fire. It’s a raw, unfussy depiction of the desolate world in which these soldiers were fighting, with no literary pretensions and all the more powerful for that.


The Wolf Wilder Katherine Rundell, Bloomsbury, 978-1408862582, £12.99 hbk My favourite Paris book in the last couple of years was Katherine Rundell’s clever, charming Rooftoppers


(following on


from her The Girl Savage, set largely in Zimbabwe); and Rundell’s back this year with her best yet, The Wolf Wilder, a story of wolves and Russian forest cold, told with incomparable warmth and humanity. Katherine Rundell knows how to tell a story, she knows how to draw characters (human and otherwise), she knows what’s important and she writes like a dream. In case you hadn’t noticed, I like this one.


The Fastest Boy in the World


Elizabeth Laird, Macmillan Children’s Books, 978-1447267171, £6.99 pbk


This year’s Carnegie Medal shortlist was packed with books that take their readers to other places: Geraldine McCaughrean’s The Middle of Nowhere, a fictional place inspired by a real one, in this case a telegraph station in middle-of-nowhere Australia; Sally


Gardner and David


Roberts’s Tinder, a kind of fairy-tale, but set against a real backdrop, that of the Thirty Years War; or the eventual winner, Tanya Landman’s Buffalo Soldier, about a slave-girl, Charley, at the end of the American Civil War. But I’ve chosen The Fastest Boy in the World, by Elizabeth Laird. Laird’s a frequent traveller in her books, and in this one she’s in a tiny Ethiopian


village, where Solomon and


his grandfather decide to make the big journey into the capital. It’s gripping, but thought-provoking, too – how much are Solomon’s attitudes and perspectives determined by where he’s from and the life he has, and how is he just like us?


The Head of the Saint Socorro Acioli, trans Daniel Hahn, Hot Key Books, 978-1471403835, £10.99 hbk For something equally remote from the experiences of most UK readers, I’ve chosen a book from South America, one I was fortunate enough to translate myself. (Please excuse the self-indulgence, I do just love this one.) It’s called The Head of the Saint, by Socorro Acioli, and it’s set in a small Brazilian town, a world


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