The Curiously Specific Book Club

We’re using the first novel in this cult series to navigate a route along the Thames tracking down various locations where detective Peter Grant encounters river nymphs, trolls and Old Father Thames. We start at the alleged source of the Thames, take in an ancient and important site at Runnymede, fail to swim in the Oxley River and end up at the Hammerton Ferry – an unusual place for fictional riv...

In part two of our adventure with Peter Ackroyd’s HAWKSMOOR, we finish our circuit of Nicholas Hawksmoor’s churches, completing a sigil on the face of London which, according to Tim’s design, will force Lloyd to reveal his real Satanic nature. We also discover the likely location for the fictional church of St Hugh’s, which now holds the dark evils of high international finance. We discuss Iain Si...

After NEVERWHERE by Neil Gaiman, we’re back with another book that manifests London in mysterious and unsettling ways. Peter Ackroyd’s HAWKSMOOR tells the tale of Nicholas Dyer, a fictional architect of the early 18th century who has been charged with building seven new churches but has his own sinister, not to say Satanic purposes. In Part One we begin at Scotland Yard in Whitehall, scene of Nich...

In Neil Gaiman’s ‘Neverwhere’, a key character – the Marquis de Carabas – lies dead atop London Wall. But where is London Wall? We not only find it, but we find a second bit of it, unknown to most people, in an underground car park. We have a grim talk about suicide and masonic murder at Blackfriars tube station, and then head back to Soho in search of the last portal mentioned in the book – a bla...

Neil Gaiman’s famous London fantasy novel provides us with an unusual route across London. We start at Albert Bridge, the supposed entrance to the mythical ‘Knight’s Bridge’. We grab a coffee at Harrods, home of a Neverwhere market. Tim surprises Lloyd with the Down Street underground station – and Tim surprises himself by discovering that his 1990s workplace was actually a portal to Neverwhere. H...

It's Lloyd's turn to pick his five best moments from Series 1 and 2 of the Curiously Specific Book Club podcast. His picks take us deep into Mick Herron's commute to work in SLOW HORSES; the disappearing landscapes of Barry Hines's A KESTREL FOR A KNAVE; Nazis parachuting onto a Norfolk beach (and possibly drowning in the high tide!) in THE EAGLE HAS LANDED; and finally, and in Lloyd's case most m...

A very merry and curiously specific Christmas to one and all! May it happen as it should, on the 25th December and with everyone gathered in exactly the right place.  Talking of which, here is Tim’s festive selection of excerpts from Series 1 and 2 – key moments when we managed to be curiously specific about a location or a date or both.  Here you can get a strong sense of what our book-...

In part two of our adventure with The Mayor of Casterbridge by Thomas Hardy we walk out of Dorchester over two bridges and down to a weir, where Michael Henchard can be found considering ending it all and seeing what appears to be a body floating down the Frome. Behind him and up on a hill we can imagine his creator looking down on to the marshy fields beyond Dorchester, because this is where Hard...

We’ve reached the 15th book of our second series of The Curiously Specific Book Club, and it’s one of the most famous books in English publishing history: Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge . Set in the fictional town of Casterbridge in the just-as-fictional county of Wessex, it’s a finely-wrought depiction of real people in real places; country-folk at the dawn of modernity in the Dorset co...

We’re halfway through a walk around the edge of the Menabilly estate in Cornwall, where Daphne Du Maurier lived for many years. We’re trying to work out how closely Menabilly aligns with the fictional house of Manderley, as featured in ‘Rebecca’ We find a gatehouse and driveway on the west side, then repair to the local pub to consider how reliable Daphne Du M might be as a narrator. Finally we wa...

“Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again…”  We’re off to Cornwall to see if the dream-house of Manderley, as featured in Daphne Du Maurier’s ‘Rebecca’, could ever be a real place.  We start off in Lostwithiel, a town where we think Rebecca’s inquest could’ve taken place. We move to Fowey, the nearest village to the grand house of Menabilly, Daphne du M’s home for many years. From t...

In part two of our adventure with Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, we have some questions, and make an apology. Our questions include: what the hell are we doing on Dartmoor? And what happened to Day Five? Our apology follows a discovery made thanks to Ship's Dog. We end on the remains of a pier at the remains of the day, pondering on the book's closing pages, and wondering what really hap...

We’re taking our first Nobel prize winner out for a walk! Actually, it’s more of a drive, as Kazuo Ishiguro’s unforgettable creation, the butler Stevens, drives his boss’s Ford down the backroads from Oxfordshire to Cornwall. In part one we ask where exactly Oxfordshire ends and Berkshire begins (clue: it isn’t where Ishiguro thinks it is); discover another epic bench; spend a night in Salisbury;...

We start Part Two in one of the ritziest parts of London – Holland Park – where both Ursula and her charismatic aunt Izzie from Kate Atkinson’s ‘Life After Life’ are meant to live (alongside Michael Powell and Michael Winner it seems).    We scurry off quickly to Soho in search of pubs and clubs featured in the novel, trying to avoid getting drunk or falling downstairs. This is the free...

We’re off in search of Fox Corner, the family home of the Todds, as featured heavily in Kate Atkinson’s time-twisting bestseller ‘Life After Life’. Is Fox Corner a real place or just made up? Or could it be a bit of both? If you want get hear all episodes as soon as they're available, and without ads, check us out on Patreon. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

We’re back with part two of our adventure with The Night Watch, by Sarah Waters, an extraordinary novel of romantic accident and passionate love against the backdrop of the Blitz and Baby Blitz in Second World War London. In this episode we follow the extraordinary walk taken by two of the book’s protagonists, Julia and Helen, as they walk across the City of London during an air raid. It’s a lands...

We’re back, with our second novel set in the Second World War. This time, it’s The Night Watch by Sarah Waters, a passionate and intricate story of doomed love affairs among the falling bombs of the Blitz and the Baby Blitz. In part one we visit Lavender Hill, Wormwood Scrubs and the tall Georgian manor houses of Marylebone, as we make our way to a bombed-out mews off Rathbone Place. Along the way...

We’ve come down the Thameslink trainline from St Albans, got off at Kentish Town and made our way to Hampstead Heath. We’re attempting to track down all the key places mentioned in Lissa Evans’s popular WW2 novel. But she is proving to be tricky. Yes, the Vale of Health is a real place and, thanks to Lloyd’s excellent sleuthing, we find where a bomb dropped on the fictional Mafeking Road. But ther...

Pack up your suitcase, write your name on a label and tie it to your coat – we’re all being evacuated to St Albans to take Lissa Evans’s popular WW2 novel for a walk.  We’re looking for the house where the main characters live, said to be near a local scrapyard. Quite why we end up sitting in an pre-Tudor nunnery and talking about a nudist colony is anyone’s guess.  If you want to l...

In part two of our Get Carter adventure, we discover another Scunthorpe – green, pleasant, well-heeled – as try and locate Kinnear’s Casino and the quarry where Jack’s brother died. Then we head 10 miles north to the abandoned brickyards of the Humber estuary, where Jack finally runs his quarry to ground. In the shadow of the bridge we wonder: where are the bodies? Are they perhaps still there ? H...

We’re taking a book out into the wild which you might know better by its film version: Get Carter , by Ted Lewis. Originally published as Jack’s Return Home , this tight, dirty, hard and mean book is as sharp as a switchblade and as cold as the dirty winter streets of Lincolnshire. We travel to Scunthorpe, the book’s location, and find a town on its knees, the great steelworks which made its fortu...

In Part Two of our attempt to use ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’ as our guide through the real world, we track down the school where a lot of the book’s action takes place. We talk warmly about Brian Glover, the man who steals the famous football scene in the movie ‘Kes’.  We also find a fish and chip shop and the abandoned cinema Billy breaks into near the end of the book. But tracking down specifi...

Forget the film ‘Kes’ (hard to do we know). Let’s take the book that inspired the movie out for a walk. We’re off to Hoyland Common, near Barnsley in Yorkshire, in search of locations from the novel ‘A Kestrel for a Knave’.  In Part One, we enquire about books on falconry at Barnsley Library. We seek out Monastery Farm where Billy Casper finds (aka steals) his kestrel. But then we start to ge...

Taking Gwendoline Riley’s exquisitely concise novel for a walk around Manchester, we’re drawn across Piccadilly Gardens, through the Arndale Centre, across to a Salford pub and then back and round to the Central Library and the canal. We marvel at how rapidly Manchester keeps changing – old buildings demolished, new ones thrown up in their place. We lament the passing of all of George Best’s many...

This small gem of novel is a great way to introduce yourself to the world of early-noughties Manchester. In Part One we journey from Ian Curtis’s Macclesfield memorial stone to a basement bar somewhere between Oxford Road and Manchester Piccadilly. For Lloyd this is a bit of a homecoming. For Tim it’s a chance to practise his John Copper Clark and Mark E Smith impressions. For both men, it’s a fan...