Top Ten Tuesday: Destination Titles

I don’t often manage to join in with Top Ten Tuesday, but today I’m going to! This week’s topic for Top Ten Tuesday (hosted by That Artsy Reader Girl) is: “Destination Titles (titles with name of places in them. These places can be real or fictional).”

I decided to make things a little harder for myself by sticking to real places – and, yes, it was rather harder than I expected. I read so many books with people’s names in the title, but placenames seem few and far between. But I have managed to come up with ten that I’ve written about on here, taking us around England, America and Europe. The links take you to my initial reviews, some of which probably are a bit chaotic in their formatting – for which, apologies. And I’ve copied a line or two from each review, by way of introduction to the books.

1. The City of Belgium by Brecht Evens

You’ll leave an Evens graphic novel feeling both unsettled and satisfied. Perhaps that isn’t always the combination you’re looking for from a book – but it is a profound mix, and sometimes feels exactly right.

2. The Ballad of Peckham Rye by Muriel Spark

Events spiral and, although the jilted bride is not the worst of the calamaties, it is a structural close to Dougal’s presence and the circular narrative itself.  All is done with Spark’s brilliant detached authorial voice, with doses of the surreal and strange interwoven with the commonplace and starkly observational.  Brilliant.

3. The Sack of Bath by Adam Fergusson

One of the more surprising choices for Persephone Books over the past few years has been The Sack of Bath (1973) by Adam Fergusson. While they have a range of titles and topics, usually they tick at least one of the boxes from ‘written by a woman’, ‘published in the first half of the 20th century’, and ‘fiction’. The Sack of Bath is none of these things – but what it is is fascinating.

4. Kamchatka by Marcelo Figueras

The novel concerns the political crises in Argentina, specifically the coup d’etat, in the 1970s. Now, you’ve quite possibly either thought “Oo, sounds intriguing” or “Um, no ta” right off the bat – but the latter group of you should keep reading.

5. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith

This link is actually to the ‘Tea or Books?’ episode – A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a lovely, moving coming-of-age novel that fits alongside other classics of the genre like I Capture the Castle and O, The Brave Music in a wonderful trio.

6. My Discovery of England by Stephen Leacock

A lot of the humour in the book comes from comparing the way English writers were treated in provincial towns in North America with the way he is treated in England’s major cities – he notes sadly, for instance, that he is not met by the mayor for a tour of the local soap factory. It’s all dry and I enjoyed it a lot.

7. Mystery at Geneva by Rose Macaulay

Macaulay is at her most satirical in this novel – a satire of detective novels, to an extent, but particularly a satire of the League of Nations. The hero is Henry Beechtree, a journalist for The British Bolshevist – and he has been sent to Geneva to cover a meeting of the League (which, at the time Macaulay’s novel was published, was still very much in its infancy.)

8. Grand Canyon by Vita Sackville-West

If you’ve read any Vita Sackville-West, you might (like me) think of her as a novelist about high society, whether Edwardians in their deviant splendour or old ladies in furs, deciding that they’d get by with only one chauffeur. What I had not expected was a novel about the Grand Canyon, a dystopia future, and a twist that might be more expected in a novel by Shirley Jackson. 

9. Reginald in Russia by Saki

My favourite story (‘The Baker’s Dozen’) is actually in the form of a play, where a widow and widower (once in love) meet again on a boat and decide to re-marry – but realise that between them, they now have thirteen children and stepchildren.  This, naturally, is an inauspicious start to marriage for the superstitious, and one of their tactics is attempting to palm off a child on fellow passenger, Mrs. Pally-Paget.

10. Fair Stood the Wind for France by H.E. Bates

Terrifying and terrible things are happening, but Bates does not inject the novel with undue drama; instead, we witness these events in a kind of a quiet horror and share the simple humanity of the characters.