Some books hold you and won’t let you go

Have you ever read a novel and had it bring you to a place you have never been and when the book ends you can never leave? I finished Lisa De Nikolits fourth novel The Witch Doctor’s Bones and I cannot get her landscape and her characters out of my mind. The same is true for D. J.  McIntosh’s The Book of Stolen Tales which I read last summer. In The Witchdoctor’s Bones a group of misfits goes on safari in a budget van to learn the beauty and lore of South Africa’s Namib desert and come to realize there is a killer among them. In The Book of Stolen Tales, New York art dealer John Madison  goes to London to source  a rare seventeenth-century Italian book of fairy tales for an anonymous client. Before he can deliver it to the buyer, he is robbed and chasing the book and the thief  through Europe and the mists of time.  In both cases the authors, and their characters, have kept a grip on my imagination.  It’s a rare skill in today’s landscape of ephemeral entertainment.  Books like these let you live differently because they bring you to another place or space.  From time to time I will blog about books such as these two. Have you read any books recently that do the same for you? Let me know.