Magical Settings and Memory Lanes by Fran Brady
I have always been drawn to books in which the setting is one of the principle characters. It may be the landscape like the wild Cornwall of Du Maurier's Rebecca; or a building like the echoing corridors of Thornfield in Bronte's Jane Eyre ; or even a claustrophobically small space, as in Emma Donoghue's chilling Room. My second novel, The Ball Game, published in 2009, was completely inspired by its setting. I had no characters or plot or even the embryo of a storyline in my head when I decided to write it. I was a student at St Andrews University in the (for me, slightly) swinging sixties. Those were four wonderful, unforgettable years, so utterly and completely different from the life that followed them that, if I thought about them at all, it was always with a sense of unreality. Did that really happen to me? They were like a book I had read or a film I had seen only ever once, adored but never returned to. Until, in the summ...