Use this powerful tool to choose your next holiday read

Travelling and Reading: Two of my favourite things in the world. Imagine my delight, then, when I discovered TripFiction.com, a website devoted to location-based fiction. There are so many of us who, when we go on holiday, would love to delve into a novel actually set in the place we are visiting to add an extra satisfying dimension to our trip. But of course, amidst the flurry of packing and organising, it’s not necessarily easy to pinpoint the relevant books.

Step in Trip Fiction – founder Tina Hartas makes it incredibly staightforward for us lovers of books and travel with simple search engines plus a whole medley of other fascinating pages including a blog, discussion board and ‘backpack’ reading lists.

Tina kindly hosted me on her blog at the end of 2016 talking about my home of Nairobi (location of The Girl and the Sunbird) and top traveller tips to this city. Before I give you the link for this, I’m delighted to have Tina on my blog today talking about how TripFiction came into being. Welcome Tina!

Thank you so much for inviting us to share a little about TripFiction and how we came to build up the website.

When travelling I have always enjoyed reading novels that are set in the location to which I am going. The idea for a website started to crystalise when I was in Bangkok, reading by the hotel pool, high above the city. The action in the novel, as it happened, was actually taking place just in the next street below and it was an amazing experience to plunge into life at street level, on the very street that appeared in my novel; it was as though I had just walked out of the book. I could imagine the characters behind the doors and in the bars, enhanced by the smells of cooking, the many sounds of daily life, and all echoed in the book.

Fast forward to a trip to Vienna and I had real difficulty finding a book set in the city. I now know that there are many, many books set in Vienna! TripFiction was thus born one evening over a glass of wine. I felt that if I was actively looking for books set in a given location, then other readers probably were too!

One of the pleasures of managing the site is meeting the people behind the books – the authors first and foremost, but also the people within an industry that brings to life the written word. There is a huge community of book lovers out there, people who work tirelessly to bring good fiction to the reader. At TripFiction we enjoy doing our little bit to help authors, who perhaps do not have the publicity machines and finance behind them, to get their work out there. And of course vicariously we have such fun travelling the globe with our featured authors!

Rebecca has given us such wonderful background to her book and now I am longing to visit Kenya and see just a little of what she has brought to life in her novel The Girl and the Sunbird.

As TripFiction grows, we are seeing more and more community members actively adding books that are strong on location, and adding reviews too. In this way we can all build the site so it is a fabulous resource for both actual and armchair travellers.

Tina, THANK YOU! Now, is this site or is it not one of the best ideas ever?

Find my guest blog on TripFiction here.

It’s easy to keep in touch with all TripFiction’s exciting offerings through its facebook page, twitter, pinterest and instagram.

Come and join the travel + book revolution!