Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys

Having travelled all over the world as a child, I enjoy reading novels that take me back to my favourite places. After growing up in Zambia, Madrid and Venezuela, I went to boarding school in Edinburgh at the age of 16. Homesick for Caracas and shivering in an unheated dorm during my first Scottish winter, I opened Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys and was transported to the heat and vivid colours of the Caribbean. I was gripped by the back story of the mad wife in the attic in Jane Eyre, the Martinique heiress Antoinette Crossway. Rhys, who was Dominican British, evoked the sights, sounds and scents of the tropics in a compelling and dramatic story that explored the disintegrating minds of both Rochester and his mentally frail Creole wife. 

Neon Rain by James Lee Burke

James Lee Burke is an entirely different kind of author but his Cajun detective, Dave Robicheaux, is as damaged by alcohol as Rhys’ heroines, and his settings as sultry. He’s a master of bringing to life the sweltering heat of Louisiana, where the bayous are full of cottonmouth snakes and jumping bass, the skies are all shades of purple and crimson, and the trees hung with Spanish moss. The first in the series is The Neon Rain, and it’s still my favourite.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

My earliest memories are from post-colonial Zambia, where I spent a free-range childhood in the bush in the years following independence. Barbara Kingsolver’s The Poisonwood Bible is an epic account of a missionary family’s tragic undoing in post-colonial Africa.  

The Pursuit of Love by Nancy Mitford

The books that remind me of Madrid, where I lived in the 1970s in the last days of Franco’s regime, are not set in Spain but are those of Nancy Mitford. My great friend, Sidonie, who sadly died young, and her sister Polly, who is still my closest friend, urged me to read The Pursuit of Love and Love in a Cold Climate. With their cast of eccentric aristocratic characters from the 1930s set against draughty piles in the Cotswolds and the Paris apartments of charming French dukes, they are my ultimate escapist read.

The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark

Once I’d become acclimatised to Edinburgh – rather dour and grey in the 1980s – I grew to love this atmospheric city with its Georgian crescents and medieval wynds, and nowhere is it better described than in Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Her “gals” who are the “crème de la crème” remind me of the fun I had with the friends I made in a very Edinburgh girls’ school, although none of us ran off to fight in a war or had an affair with the art teacher – not as far as I know, anyway.

Daisy Chain by Maggie Ritchie is published on June 10 by Two Roads.