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From the idyllic Greek Island Cephallonia in his 1993 best-seller Captain Corelli's Mandolin to the Turkish battlefields that form the backdrop of 2004's Birds Without Wings, Louis de Bernieres has set his stories in some striking locales.
Archway, the bleak north London suburb where his latest novel
A Partisan's Daughter is based, could not be more different. "I've been trying to learn the ways in which my own country is exotic," says de Bernieres. "Obviously, if you are brought up somewhere, you don't think it is exotic.
It is only when you talk to foreigners that you realise what's peculiar or charming about your country. "That was pointed out to me many years ago by a Frenchman, who said he thought that England was the most exotic country in Europe. I was really surprised, and he followed that up by saying it's an immense lunatic asylum.
That surprised me even more but when I thought about where I grew up, he is absolutely right. Everybody was a little bit mad but I didn't think so at the time." But the book is a return home for the 53-year-old writer, who lives in Diss in rural Norfolk. He lived in a rundown shared house in Archway during the late 1970s in which the novel takes place.
"It was the Winter of Discontent," he recalls. "Jim Callaghan's Labour government was failing, everybody was on strike, and then Margaret Thatcher came in and gave the country a kick up the backside. I looked back through the news of the time including what was happening in the wider world.
Iran was in a state of revolution... and Sebastian Coe broke the 800m and the 1500m world records. I also looked at what was on the radio at the time and it was all I Will Survive and I Don't Like Mondays. It was nice to be able to do that, to in a way reconstruct bits and pieces of my own past." But de Bernieres did not return to his old stomping ground while he was writing the novel.
"There was no point, as so much time has passed. The buildings have either been destroyed or done up. It wouldn't be the same. I can't even remember what number in the street I was in.
It just felt like it was winter all the time." Much of the narrative of The Partisan's Daughter - which centres on the increasingly tall tales that young illegal Serbian immigrant Roza tells disaffected middle-aged salesman Chris - are drawn from the reminiscences of de Bernieres' former Belgradian flatmate. "People have asked me if I am still in touch with her but not really.
Somebody even asked me, 'Do you think she would sue you' - but it's more likely she'd shoot me, being a Balkan girl." De Bernieres says The Partisan's Daughter could have been his first novel. But it is only in recent years that the plot has taken shape. "All I did was write down all Roza's stories.
It didn't amount to a novel because there was no plot and over the years it sort of evolved into what it is now with Chris, who was a helpful suggestion from my editor. I kept nagging at the story and he said, 'I think you are obsessed with this woman' and I said, 'I'm not but I should have someone who is', so Chris turned up and made the whole thing possible."
Chris originally meets Roza when she inadvertently gets into his car one night. He believes her to be a prostitute and she plays along, claiming to be a call girl. "I always thought of it as a kind of French novel where it's about two people who mess up a relationship by trying to impress each other in the wrong way," says de Bernieres.
"That's how Roza messes it up. She says at the end of the first section that 'it was the most destructive thing I could have done', whether it's true or not and you never know if it was. She really regrets telling him because it puts the whole thing on a false footing. People often make that mistake and it comes back and gets you later when it turns out that it was false or an exaggeration."
In many ways, Roza and Chris both yearn to escape from humdrum existences, which is precisely what de Bernieres' daughter, who has moved to New Zealand, has done. "She has met a new husband," says de Bernieres, who visited Wellington for the 2004 Writers and Readers Week.
"I think of New Zealand, Australia and Canada as the closest way [to escape the humdrum]- if you are young and energetic, you can really make a good life for yourself. They are not worn out the way that Britain sometimes is. If I was young again, I'd go there."
* A Partisan's Daughter (Random House $34.99)
