​Recently I’ve been driving round several parts of the North Island and the pleasure of exploration has been enhanced by visiting areas where several of my favourite books were set.  Like wine makers, I think some writers have their own terroir – a deep personal knowledge of their settings that adds immeasurably to the flavour of their writing.
When travelling along the Kaipara Harbour I had the joy of recognising Jean Louise Allen’s territory –  the Northern Wairoa river that runs like an artery through all her books and stories. The whisper of wavelets on mudflats, the tide gurgling among the mangroves, the scent of sun-warmed jetties – all felt familiar from Bitty by the River, River at War, and River, River. Her books are set in a simpler age when lives were entwined with nature and hardships were faced with courage.

​Nearby, spending a few days in Tinopai, I was reminded of Ines Helberg’s heart-filling novel A Tumble and a Litre of Milk. I found myself looking for the grocery store and the big house on the hill, quite forgetting it was fiction.

​Further up the island and into the wilder parts of Northland I recognised the flavour of Peter Rankin’s thriller Stealing the Trees, where his main character wants to live a quiet rural life but finds himself mixed up in murder and kidnapping out in the bush. The scent of crushed manuka and a fresh breeze from the sea give the story a sense of place that anchors it firmly in its setting.

​I even found a historical homestead way up the North Cape that any colonial heroine would have felt at home in, like brave young Brigid in Vicky Adin’s novel The Girl from County Clare, making a new home in New Zealand after sailing halfway around the world. The white picket fence and roses, the shady veranda, and the rich timber floors felt perfectly familiar from Vicky’s detailed descriptions of houses of that era.

​Right at the very tip of Cape Reinga, if you look to the right (past the teeming hordes of tourists), you may be able to see Kerr Point - named for Thomas Kerr featured in Jean Day's non-fiction book The Search for Thomas Kerr, which is a fascinating insight into a man who lived several lives' in his careers of mapmaker, missionary and meteorologist.

​I’m very much setting-driven in my own writing, especially my crime novels, and have a tendency to look at places with an eye for murder and mayhem. A tense scene in Eye for an Eye came from working in a dark photographic studio in Toronto, and the Theatre Mysteries Murder in the Second Row and Body on the Stage would never have been written without a detailed knowledge of the old Theatre Royal in Nelson.

Have you found books that transported you to places so well you felt you’d been there? Which writers have succeeded in mastering their terroir and taking you there?

​Signing off from a wild campsite at the easternmost part of New Zealand, 15th January.

Well dear readers, since I seem to have brought myself to a standstill for almost a year by trying to write the perfect series of blog posts, I’m going to quit stalling and just post little items of interest as we travel instead.

To explain the situation so far… in the previous post, Blogging and the Fear of Failure, we were about to sell our house after long and exhausting renovations, and were uncertain if our massive gamble would work out. Short answer – yes and no. The house did sell, and for a fair price – just not as much as we’d hoped for so at the time it felt like a huge failure. Our wild dreams had to be trimmed back, but once we started to move ahead the heartbreak of the house auction soon faded.
We flew to Canada where my husband has family in Ontario with the plan of buying a cruiser to travel the Trent-Severn waterway from Lake Ontario to Lake Huron – something we’ve been hoping to do since our honeymoon in 1981. Yes, it has taken a while! It took two months to buy a boat and we spent two months travelling the waterways before the season ended and we stored the boat for winter halfway along the canal. The plan is to return in May 2017 and complete the journey.

So back in New Zealand in October with nowhere to live, we bought a motorhome (RV) so we had a base to explore other options for property-buying, income opportunities etc. As I write we are in the process of buying a house and cottage in the Mount Ruapehu ski area which will earn maximum rental in the winter while we’re away. Ohakune is a delightful ski town in the middle of the North Island and while we had no intention of moving there, it doesn’t seem a bad place to have as a base. We’ll let you know how that works out!