ROOMS OF ONE'S OWN

Sub-titled '50 Places That Made Literary History', our literary journey begins in the British Isles and takes us to Paris, St Petersburg, New York, Saigon and Bangkok, and unearths the real-life places behind our best-loved works of fiction. Mourby explores 50 rooms where great works of literature first saw the light of day, from the Brontës' Yorkshire parsonage to the New Orleans of Truman Capote, Christopher Isherwood's Berlin to the now legendary café where J. K. Rowling plotted Harry Potter's first adventures. In Italy we see George Sand, Thomas Mann, Ernest Hemingway, John Keats, Henry James and E. M. Forster. In Northern England and North Wales William Wordsworth, Beatrix Potter, Ted Hughes and Noël Coward, in London Samuel Johnson, Charles Dickens, Oscar Wilde and Rudyard Kipling; in Oxford Lewis Carroll, J. R. R. Tolkien and William Morris. In East Asia Lascadio Hearn, G. B. Shaw, Somerset Maugham and Graham Greene. Virginia Woolfe famously said that, if she is to write fiction, "a woman must have money and a room of her own". Here is the Room with A View that E. M. Forster coveted in Florence, but not every great writer or every room that has witnessed great literature had a view or has made it into these 50 chapters. H. G. Wells set one of his bestselling works Mr Britling Sees It Through in his own house in Essex. Olivia Manning used her own Cairo flat in the Levant Trilogy and James Joyce wrote exclusively about Dublin while sitting in his favourite Paris restaurants. Oscar Wilde liked to write and entertain in expensive hotels, but Hemingway and Noël Coward stayed in the best hotels around the world simply because they could. They could all write well regardless of their surroundings. 50 literary pilgrimages, 245pp in well illustrated paperback.