When we hesitate to move far from home it’s books that can take us to places real and imagined and bring us their riches.

How do authors make places come alive for readers? My novella In the Sweep of the Bay takes people to the seaside resort of Morecambe and the Lake District. I’ll look at how I set a story in those places in the book, as well as the way it’s done by other authors, including Graham Greene’s evocation of Haiti in The Comedians, the Cuba of Karla Suárez’s Havana Year Zero, and the imaginary city in Juan Emar’s Yesterday.