“The current ease of travel means that many people can afford to cross seas and continents more casually than their ancestors could. This, together with the understandable notion that fiction should be experienced, or at least based on solid research, in order to be credible means that writers are likely to take their fictional journeys in the flesh. But, whether from perversity or a lack of funds, I find myself drawn to more constrained ways of writing about places: to novelists who write into the void, who travel irresponsibly or recklessly, who fail to do their research, or who find one landscape collapsing into another.”—”Top 10 imaginary journeys in literature. Disobeying the injunction to write only ‘what you know’, authors from Bram Stoker to Virginia Woolf have created rich fictional adventures into the unknown.”

A list by Christy Edwall, author of History Keeps Me Awake at Night [Amazon, Bookshop UK], includes (links to the library added): “1. Dracula by Bram Stoker … 2. À Rebours (Against the Grain) by JK Huysmans … 8. The Book of Disquiet by Fernando Pessoa”