Misleading place names in book titles!

7th April 2025

In the TripFiction office we have identified four books where the place name mentioned in the title has nothing whatsoever to do with where the book is set! We would love to write a blog post on this strange phenomenon but really do need five books before we can complete this.

Can we ask you to rack your brains and memory to come up with a fifth one? The first person out of the hat will be rewarded with a gift box featuring a copy of Human Remains (the great new thriller by Jo Callaghan) and other goodies – an ‘evidence bag’, a moleskin notebook, and various exotic teas. Plus an acknowledgement in the post itself when we publish.

Here are the four books we have identified so far:

Adelaide by Genevieve Wheeler – set in LONDON

On an otherwise ordinary day, 26-year-old American expat Adelaide Williams walks into a London hospital and asks for help. Something’s not right. She doesn’t feel like herself any more.

For the past year, she’s been dating Rory Hughes, the charming man she met when she was least expecting to fall in love. Does he respond to texts? Honour his commitments? Make advance plans? Sometimes, rarely, and no, not at all. Despite everything, Adelaide is convinced he’s The One.

But when tragedy strikes unexpectedly, their relationship crumbles, and Adelaide realises she doesn’t want to live without him. Because how can you move on from a love that’s changed you forever?

An emotional, relatable debut from a fresh new voice that captures the timeless nature of what it’s like to be young and in love – with your friends, with your city, and with the one person who cannot, will not, love you back.

The Tokyo Suite by Giovana Madalosso – set in BRAZIL

A good nanny is hard to find. Fernanda, a busy executive whose marriage is foundering, has a room in her sprawling house redecorated in the style of a tiny luxury hotel room, the Tokyo Suite, to entice her maid Maju to stay.

Still, one morning, Maju walks out the door, slips past the army of nannies in the square, gets into a taxi, and vanishes. She also takes Fernanda’s daughter Cora with her.

Consumed by her own personal and professional crises Fernanda doesn’t realize at first that Cora is missing, and that Maju has kidnapped her, but when she does, she is violently pulled back into reality and the vagaries of her domestic life.

Meanwhile, Maju with Cora in tow, stops in cheap motels and abandoned locales as she makes her way across the Brazilian countryside, carrying out her plan, which will quickly and brutally veer out of control.

Madalosso sets in motion the lives of characters endlessly searching for something―affection, redemption, sex―to free them.  Cora’s disappearance puts the past and the present on a collision course, and ignites desires, resentments, and class tensions. The desperate quest that ensues is a settling of scores with life and the expectations we create for ourselves.

Prague by Arthur Phillips – set in BUDAPEST

A group of American expats en route to adventure, inspiration, or perhaps even history-in-the-making in Prague, somehow get sidetracked and settle instead for the enigmatic city of Budapest. Arriving in Hungary’s capital to pursue his elusive brother, journalist John Price finds himself drawn into the din of Budapest’s nightclubs, a romance with a secretive young diplomat, the table of an elderly cocktail pianist, and the moody company of a young man obsessed with nostalgia, all in a bid to forget the larger questions that arise in a city still pocked with bullet holes from war and crushed rebellion. With humour, intelligence and masterly prose, Phillips captures the character of his contemporaries and brilliantly renders a very weird ‘modern’ city.

Matterhorn by Karl Marlantes – set in VIETNAM

Base Matterhorn: a fortress carved into the jungle. Monsoon clouds swirl around the high summit, which is the hiding place of the marines from Bravo company. Close to Laos and North Vietnam, this is total isolation, skirmishes and battles mark the increasingly desperate war in Vietnam. Second Lieutenant Waino Mellas, 21 years old and just a few days into his 13-month tour, has barely arrived at Matterhorn before Bravo Company is ordered to abandon their mountain and sent deep in-country in pursuit of a North Vietnamese Army unit. Mellas faces disease, starvation, leeches, tigers and a virutally invisible enemy….

A fifth one, please! 

HOW TO ENTER

1. You need to be a member of TripFiction. Simply go to tripfiction.com and scroll down to the JOIN NOW tab. And we do check!
2. Just let us know in the Comments below by midnight, 15 May 2025 the title of your suggested fifth book.

A copy of Human Remains by Jo Callaghan plus a goodie box will be set to the winner (drawn at random)

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