ROOMS OF ONE'S OWN: 50 Places That Made Literary History

Writers' relationships with their surroundings are seldom straightforward. For some like Jane Austen and Thomas Mann novels were set where they were staying - Lyme Regis and Venice respectively. Victor Hugo penned Les Misérables in an attic in Guernsey, and Noël Coward wrote that most English of plays Blithe Spirit in the Welsh holiday village of Portmeirion. Award-winning BBC drama producer Adrian Mourby follows his literary heroes around the world, exploring 50 places where great works of literature first saw the light of day. At each destination, from the Brontës' Yorkshire parsonage in the Moors to the New York of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood's Berlin to the now legendary Edinburgh café where J. K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter's first adventures, Mourby explains what the writer was doing there and what the visitor can find today. A literary journey from the British Isles to Paris, Berlin, New Orleans, New York and Bangkok, unearthing the real life places behind our best-loved works of literature. Among the writers are George Sand, E. M. Forster, Thomas Hardy, Vita Sackville-West, William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Ted Hughes, Charles Dickens, William Morris, Mervyn Peake, Dorothy Parker, Alexander Pushkin, Graham Greene and Paul Bowles in North Africa. Arranged by region, a clever concept and fascinating tales. 256 page paperback with full page black and white photos.