Novel set in fictional small-town AMERICA
Talking Location With … T J Derry: THE MENTAWAIS, Sumatra
17th October 2025
#TalkingLocationWith ... T J Derry, author of Carried Away: THE MENTAWAIS, Sumatra
Carried Away: Why I Chose the Mentawai Islands
I’ll admit something upfront, because pretending otherwise feels disingenuous: I’ve never set foot on Nias, or any island in the Mentawais. The jungles, the world-class surf, the tiny palm-flecked atolls—it all exists in the half-real, half-imagined creative ether with the rest of fiction. Yet when I began the process of writing Carried Away, I knew instinctively that this chain of islands off the Sumatran coast was exactly where it all goes down.
So why the Mentawais? Because they embody the possibility this kind of story demands. They’re just remote enough to be dangerous, wild enough to be mysterious, and diverse enough to host such an improbable adventure that feels, paradoxically, inevitable once you’ve been carried out to sea with the characters.
I wanted this to feel real, like you might mistake it for reportage, or one of those Drama in Real Life stories from Reader’s Digest back in the day. If I had set my book in Costa Rica or Bali, the edges of plausibility would have frayed too quickly. Beaches packed with tourists, overachieving infrastructure, Wi-Fi signals bouncing off the palms… adventure can’t thrive in the same place as Uber Eats. The Ments, by contrast, are both legendary and elusive: mecca for the core lord. A place the reader might not have heard about and can’t instantly picture on Google Street View.
The Practical Magic of Remoteness
The primary reason I chose the Mentawais is brutally practical. My novel is, at its core, a survival story. Tsunamis, isolation, the fragility of human bodies against nature’s indifference—all of it depends on my characters ending up somewhere that feels utterly cut off from the safety nets of modern life. And those nets, unfortunately, keep spreading and the world keeps shrinking. The Ments still give you that vanishing act, that last sliver of a world where you can disappear and not immediately be pinged by push notification.
Mentawais via Pixabay (Gridkid)
The Mentawais are 150 kilometers off Sumatra’s coast, scattered as if Pangea was a work of pure fiction. Four main islands. Dozens of smaller ones. Hundreds of unnamed sandbars and reefs where you could disappear and never be found. That’s not melodrama; it’s geography. In other words: if you were carried away—literally, figuratively, fatally—this is where it could happen.
When I imagined my characters washing ashore after the disaster, I needed a location where that wasn’t just realistic, but natural. A place where you might end up after the world was turned upside down by a massive tsunami. There aren’t many locations where one minute you could be surfing, and the next, you’re spit out onto a deserted beach flanked by jungle with no mainland in sight. The Mentawais gave me that, without needing to aggressively suspend disbelief.
A Playground for Adventure
The other reason was adventure. The Mentawais aren’t just another stop on the world tour—they’re the last undistilled vestige. A bastion for the purist. Only the truly committed make it, the ones willing to bleed time, money, and sanity just to paddle into a wave most people will never even see—that reputation was irresistible to me as a storyteller.
To drop my characters into this setting meant tapping into a mythos already alive in surf culture: the idea of chasing something and suddenly finding yourself in over your head. That’s a theme that bleeds into every chapter of Carried Away.
Costa Rica, for example, has its waves, its jungles, its romance. But it’s also an eco-tourism postcard—one concrete foundation away from a Starbucks invasion. The Mentawais are rowdier. More elemental. There’s beauty, yes, but also a sense that nature hasn’t been tamed for your Instagram reel.
The author
Wildlife, Both Exotic and Human
The Mentawais aren’t just sand and surf—they’re alive with the creatures that make survival stories seem more visceral. Sharks patrolling the shores, crocodiles lurking in estuaries, mosquitos carrying whatever disease evolution’s been working on.
But wildlife isn’t just a panoply of animals; it’s tone. The night sounds of the jungle. The glow of bioluminescent plankton in the surf. The flick of a gecko vanishing into a patch of bamboo. These details—whether gleaned from research or conjured in the imagination—turn setting into character.
And then there’s the other kind of wildlife: people. Fishermen, resort employees spinning yarns, local guides, surfers who flew halfway around the world to chase their dreams. The Mentawais are remote but not empty, and that tension—the sense of being cut off, but never entirely alone—fed my narrative’s fire.
Fiction as an Act of Assumption
Maybe you’re thinking. “You’ve never been there, so what gives you the right?” Fair question. My answer: fiction. That’s the whole gig. If we only wrote about places we’d been, half the world’s novels wouldn’t exist. Crichton stuck Jurassic Park on an island off the coast of Costa Rica—where no islands even exist. That’s decent company to keep.
The Ments I wrote about aren’t on a Lonely Planet itinerary; they’re stitched together from what I’ve seen, conversations I’ve had, and what the story demanded. COVID killed my plans to travel there during the writing process, and then life got in the way. I’ve spent enough of my time exploring the remote tropics to know how it feels. I’ve climbed coconut trees, built shelters, spearfished in reefs, and walked away from enough dangerous situations on my own. This was just a lift—what I knew in one place, dropped onto another. Nothing fictional in its essence, just a blurring of geographic lines.
Funny thing is that readers tell me the setting feels like the realest part. Which just proves it’s not about getting every tree right—it’s about making you believe there’s a jungle out there. If I can get you to smell the bonfire across the bay or hear the buzz of insects under a swollen moon—then no one cares whether your passport ever got stamped in Padang.
Why It Had to Be the Mentawais
In the end, the Mentawais gave me something no other setting could: plausibility shot through with mystery. There are so many islands and atolls, that the notion of Cole and his friends ending up on one tiny, nameless scrap of sand feels not just possible, but inevitable.
It’s geography as destiny. In the Ments, you can vanish—or you can find yourself. Sounds like one of those “dance like no one’s watching” slogans painted on driftwood, hanging in some suburban kitchen, until you realize the only reason no one’s watching is because you’re alone, and very possibly screwed. Civilization doesn’t usually give you that anymore.
That’s why I chose it. Not because it was obvious or some writer’s axiom. But because once I looked at the Mentawais as an option, I couldn’t imagine it happening anywhere else.
Conclusion
Carried Away is a novel about survival, but also about searching—for meaning, for connection, for the fragile thread that keeps us human when everything else is stripped away. The Mentawais, whether real or imagined, offered me the kindling.
And maybe that’s the point. You don’t need to be on a boat to feel the cool air turning warm and the smell of land as you near shore, or the sounds of a crocodile bellowing from the dark to know how that would feel. Sometimes you just need to read a book, and let the world—half real, half imagined—carry you away.
T J Derry
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