Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner was a revelation to me, showing me an Afghanistan I had never appreciated from semi-detached viewing on the evening news. And The Year of Living Danishly, by Helen Russell, was a book to devour in one greedy sitting, celebrating a fascinating country that, for example, views its church rather like the NHS – something people are happy to fund although they rarely use it, so they can depend on it being there when they need it.

Books can take you beyond what you already know, and it’s great. But don’t all books transport us to some place special? Or, at least, the good ones do.

Among my all-time favourite literature are the Adrian Mole diaries by the late Sue Townsend. These are set in Leicester, a small city in England’s East Midlands. There are no iconic shops in this city centre – no Saks Fifth Avenue or Harrods or Galeries Lafayette. There is Next, though, and Adrian memorably brings his young son on a festive visit to town to see Santa Claus arriving, abseiling down the side of Debenhams.

Adrian returns to Debenhams to equip (on credit) the converted warehouse apartment he has over-stretched himself to buy, at a supposedly up-and-coming riverside location inauspiciously named Rat Wharf. Among his aspirational purchases are a futon bed and the obligatory Dualit toaster. He is distressed when he discovers that the bathroom in his open-plan pad, contained by a glass-brick wall, leaves nothing of his activities visibly or audibly to the imagination of his guests. Leicester could hardly be regarded as exotic – it is a known world. But is the reader transported to a particular version of it by Townsend’s incisive instinct for which apparently mundane details to include? Completely.

In The Cappuccino Years, Adrian moves to London, where he works as a chef in a Soho restaurant patronised by public school types, and is later given his own television cookery show. Adrian’s English capital, however, does not feature landmarks and bright lights. Like his home city, it is depicted in the tiny details of a life entirely devoid of glamour, such as the items of catering equipment with which he shares his room above the ‘shop’.

Even closer to home, we have another chronicler of life and times to whose Dublin it is a joy and delight to be transported – even, or perhaps especially, if you happen to live there. Paul Howard’s Ross O’Carroll-Kelly, like Mole, shows us a world we think we know, only a hell of a lot funnier.

Of course it’s important to read widely and see what’s out there – it’s a big world and there’s a lot to learn – but isn’t it also true that really good writing can make any place special?

I Know I saw Her by E D Thompson is published in trade paperback by Hachette Ireland.

Main featured image: Neptune’s Chatto is made using the early 20th-century craft of Lloyd Loom; www.neptune.com.