![]() ![]() ![]() The very fact of the forest being a dark, wild and unpredictable place links it to the passions of the lovers in the play, it’s a place they escape to. The forest in A Midsummer Night’s Dream is the province of the fairies, humans that dare to stray there are bound to be subject to their interference and mischief. Is this my favourite Shakespeare play? A toss up between this and the dark brooding Macbeth. ![]() The sense of place-a brand new estate in the middle of a forest-is every bit as vivid as Proust’s Combray and the descriptions of the forest and the natural world seen through Knausgard’s childhood eyes are sublime. In Book Three, Boyhood Island, the narrative jumps back in time to Knausgard’s childhood and the seven years spent during the 1970s on the small island of Tromora off Norway’s southern coast. Six autobiographical titles make up one of Norway’s biggest publishing phenomenon and Knausgard’s My Struggle series has been compared to Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time in its depth of remembrance and detail. It fascinated me from the first moment I stepped under the canopy. I knew straight away I’d found the setting for my story-it’s such a magical, haunting place yet is also a living, breathing contemporary community. Then quite by chance on a day out we took a turn off the road, over a little stone bridge in Monmouth, and found ourselves in the Forest of Dean. I had the idea for this story for some while and tried writing it in various settings and something was always slightly awry. It’s the story of Ruby, who on hearing on her thirteenth birthday that she is adopted, races out to the garden and sings for joy.īecause of the brutality of her early life she vows to find her true family, although what this leads to is the uncovering of family secrets, both in her own and others, and ultimately the discovery of a dead body. My own book, The Doll Funeral, is set in the Forest of Dean-an ancient woodland close to the border of Wales. Author Kate Hamer shares the books that inspired her latest thriller, The Doll Funeral. Forests are such deep, dark, mystical places – in every story with a forest setting it seems that the forest becomes a character in its own right. ![]()
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