Bishop Auckland writer Wendy Robertson has got to 'know' many countries before she's even set foot there. From the comfort of her armchair, she explains how

'Just right for the armchair traveller," said an agent, having read my new book,Writing at the Maison Bleue. I never went on holiday as a child living in a small house on a short street in a little South Durham town. Apart from a bus-ride to stay overnight with a relative, or a day train trip to Crimdon Dene, Seaton Carew or Whitley Bay, that is.

But even then, in my head, I had journeyed to many exotic places. This was because my mother Barbara was a dedicated reader of books from the library located in a double-fronted house at the end of our short street. So, week by week, our small house was littered with books evoking faraway places like Zanzibar, Peru, South Africa, Borneo, Delhi, Hong Cong, and San Francisco. And that other faraway place: London.

It’s true that at that time these novels reflected an unreconstructed British Empire view of the world, but still they brightened my mother’s world, taking her away from her life as a single parent bringing up four children on low factory wages.

And from the age of eight - as a rather forward child - I was keeping up with her, travelling with her to these faraway places. So from that small house in the short street in the small town in South Durham, I had a an intriguingly wide view of a world not limited by place, class or time.

This was how I began my career as an armchair traveller and, coincidentally, a writer and novelist.

The novels I read –as good novels do – made these strange places familiar. Without crossing the threshold of my small house, I could walk the mean streets of San Francisco, queue up for my entry to the Coliseum in Roma through the gladiator’s gate, ride through the Rocky Mountains, climb the Eiffel Tower and ride a rickshaw in Shanghai.

In time, when I grew up, I got to visit such places and check the truth behind the fiction. I was never disappointed. Although there was much new stuff to discover, I was pleased I hadn’t come to them knowing nothing about them

I don’t think I am alone in my experience. Many people nowadays live busy, hurried, intense lives and they look forward to holidays, which are much more common now than they were in my childhood. Some collect books to read by the pool or in the garden chair, or they will read them during the winter so that they don’t arrive at their destination as a stranger.

This was the way, among many other fiction writers, I got to "know" the Florence of Henry James, James Joyce’s Dublin, Nadine Gordimer’s South Africa, and Chinue Achebe’s Nigeria. Then, more recently, I've become familiar with the France of Kate Mosse and Sebastian Faulks, Louis de Berniere’s Cephalonia and Solzhenitsyn’s Russia.

There is a difference, of course, between reading as an armchair traveller and reading while abroad. These days when I pack my bag to travel abroad in the flesh, I choose novels to read at leisure by the French harbour and alongside of the French canal. The leisure time is enticing. Unlike the armchair fiction which I have read through the cold English winters, the novels I take can be anything, from recent national and international prize-winners, to new novels by friends, or recommended by them. I am known to compete with my lovely son-in-law as to how many books we can get through in three weeks. He usually wins.

Packing your books can add (often welcome) weight to your luggage. But the advent of reading on Kindle and other eBooks has allowed some readers to upload their machine with a dozen or so books and lighten their literary luggage. My practice is to combine the two methods, though I must say I like the rustle of pages as I flick through them in the sunshine.

The odd thing nowadays is that novels that other people read during the cold winters, or take for their summer’s travelling in paperback or on their Kindle - these could be books written by me. This is especially so because two recent titles are set in the deep South West of France.

My newest title, Writing at the Maison Bleue, is set in a fascinating house by the Canal du Midi. I know this part of France well, having travelled there consistently through the last ten years. Of course, underpinning this physical experience has been my lifelong obsession with reading fiction (and fact!) about France. This made me a Francophile even before I landed. It was a familiar place to me even when I first arrived, so it’s rather nice that one early reviewer said the novel was "a must for Francophiles".

All this might seem a long way for that little girl in a small house on a short street in a little South Durham town. But it’s not that far really. Only as far as the library.

Writing at the Maison Bleue is available at Durham County Libraries and in print and Kindle form on amazon.co.uk. The official launch is on Friday, May 1, from 7.30pm, at the Lafkaido Hearn Culture Centre at the University of Japan, Durham DH1 3YB (opposite the Oriental Museum).

Parking available. W: lifetwicetasted.blogspot.co.uk/

Reader competition

Wendy will donate a copy of her book to the reader who comes up with the most interesting three book titles to take on holiday, with a short description of why they would need to be packed. Email your entries to wenrob73@hotmail.com before April 30. Usual Newsquest competition rules apply.