Setting: the Where and When of Fiction

I love to read about World War II on the Channel Islands, the only English-speaking territory occupied by the Nazis. I got hooked on this setting in Tim Binder’s Sleeping With the Enemy. Proof I loved this book: I finished it in paperback and turned around and bought it in hardcover. Other books I’ve enjoyed with this setting: The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society by Mary Ann Shaffer and Annie Barrows and more recently Margaret Leroy’s The Soldier’s Wife.

Many books I’ve loved are set during WWII. I began to wonder why certain time periods and places resonate with me. My parents met on a street car in Washington, D.C. in June, 1944. My mother, 19 and already a college graduate, was a high school Latin teacher; Dad was a US Marine, who had lied about his birthday to be old enough to join the Corps. That summer Mom worked as a government girl at the War Department, and Dad, who had been on Pearl in 1941 when it was bombed, was stationed at Quantico, Virginia. Their stories about this time still intrigue me.

Fast forward more than 50 years. In 2001 I won a fiction grant and traveled to London, where I lived with some wonderful nuns in South Kensington. The summer of 2001 was a lot like the autumn before December 1941. The US was on the brink of great change. Not that I had any sense of this in London that summer when I contracted a disease I call wanderlust. Its only cure: travel. Soon after the travel ban lifted, my husband and I saw Paris in the snow, where he too contracted wanderlust. Our next trip was to the land of his ancestors: Poland. Krakow’s market square took our breath away. This place embedded in my heart. I have set my novel, The Matchmaker of Krakow, there.

What settings resonate with you? What time periods do you like to read about? Have you figured out why these times and places attract you?