Looking for particular settings

[Elena]

Hi! I'm looking for books that portray a particular location, like Perdido Street Station does with New Crobuzon, but in the everyday world. I'd wish to avoid touristy Stendhal syndrome induced gushing, so A Room with a View or The Enchanted April for Italy wouldn't be immediate choices. Perhaps only native accounts?
I enjoyed Eureka Street for Belfast, Trainspotting for Glasgow, Winter's Bone for the Ozarks. I'd particularly appreciate cold places, like Norway or Canada.
Other factors are less important. My particular pet peeves include psycho-killers and entire lack of plot, but I'm lax in the definition of lack of plot. I tend to like survival and revenge stories.

This is a great group! I hope my request was well done.

[Christy]

I'm not sure if these will satisfy your desire, but here are some authors that I think tend to include a strong sense of place in their writing and who I think are generally brilliant: Linda Hogan, Louise Erdrich, and Barbara Kingsolver. Kingsolver's great but writes about warmer locales (the American southwest, Africa). Erdrich's locales are more northern and might work, but if I'm imagining cold places, I think of Linda Hogan's Solar Storms, which is set close to the U.S./Canada border and is simply beautifully written.

For cold settings, perhaps also check out Dan Simmons' The Terror and Yuri Rytkheu's A Dream in Polar Fog. They are very different types of book, but both are quite good and both provide a strong sense of the cold North.

I hope some of these are what you're looking for!

[scherzo♫]

Crow Lake
Here is a gorgeous, slow-burning story set in the rural “badlands” of northern Ontario, where heartbreak and hardship are mirrored in the lands...

White-Out
This is a paean to the natural beauty of Antarctica and a memorable story of courage, of the triumph of the human spirit, and of a transcendent love.

Not cold, but South Carolina and New York are as essential as his family to Pat Conroy's main character in The Prince of Tides.


The group Around the World in 80 Books in a great resource for exploring books based on location. Scroll down to the 10th folder for the first of the book lists.
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/5...

[karen, future RA queen]

Annabel does a good job with canada, and not a single serial killer!

Kamouraska, maybe also for canada. this one is mostly an internal story, but i do remember some terrestrial description.

[Elena]

I should have found the group that pjreads links to before asking here. Oh well.
These look really interesting! Thank you so much. I’m starting with Kamouraska because I'm lazy and french is easier than english for me, but I’ll check the others when I’m finished.

Far away lands, cold weather, and survival - the perfect pack for exam period. Yay! Although maybe I should have asked instead for books aimed at people whose brain presently resemble a pressed lemon.

I feel like there should be a squashed citric demographic somewhere.

[scherzo♫]

Buena suerte en sus exámenes!

(I hope that means: Good luck on your exams!)

[Jaye]

There is this place on goodreads that gives suggestions by locations:

http://www.goodreads.com/places

[karen, future RA queen]

wow - i had no idea this existed - thank you so much!

[Jaye]

karen wrote: "wow - i had no idea this existed - thank you so much!"

No one does. Hardly. There's no index to goodreads.
It's a fluke to find things like that, then try to re-find them...impossible.

I found it because someone else mentioned it, then had to ask about it when I wanted to go to it again. Impossible to find on your own and remember how to get there. I finally bookmarked it.