Travel through the Book of Doors to NYC – Gareth Brown

Submitted: 1st February 2024

The Book of Doors in New York City

Get excited. This is THE book to read in 2024. It will take you to some of the dreamiest and most magical locations you will ever visit. It’s a magical read in every meaning of the word. Set primarily in New York….in a bookshop no doubt, this wilk warm your heart, hug your books and sigh with bookish delight.

Gareth Brown

And Gareth Brown is HERE!!!!!!!!

And he’s opened his book and it is taking us here…..

Map locations in The Book of Doors

book-of-doors 1

Map locations in The Book of Doors

I love all big cities, but I love New York City more than any other. Of all the cities I’ve ever visited in my life – and there have been many – New York always feels the most city-like city, if that makes sense! Perhaps it is the scale of everything, the height of the buildings, the volume of people and traffic, the noise, but I have always found it an exhilarating place to be.

Map locations in The Book of Doors

I remember my first ever visit, back in 2004, when I emerged from Penn Station in the middle of the day. Surrounded by tall buildings and yellow cabs and NYPD officers and a car honking its horn and it just felt exactly like I wanted New York City to feel like. I am not convinced I would enjoy living there (or any big city, for that matter). However, visiting New York City, without the day-to-day burdens demands of work and life, when your time is your own, is always a treat.

2nd Avenue where Kellner Books in the novel is located:

Map locations in The Book of Doors

Back in 2019, my wife and I were planning to visit the US in 2020. We wanted to meet some family and to revisit some of our favourite places, including New York. But then some global pandemic happened and nobody was really able to travel anywhere. I ended up spending many hours in my spare bedroom, working full time from home and also trying to write. All I wanted to do was to escape, to travel. That is really where The Book of Doors came from. I daydreamed about opening the door of my room and stepping out onto a street across the world. What would it be like to be able to do that? Where would I go?

The Library hotel is located here and the Library Walk!

Map locations in The Book of Doors

These are exactly the questions that face Cassie Andrews in The Book of Doors, when she finds herself in possession of a magical book that can turn any door into every door. Cassie and her best friend Izzy are soon off exploring, revisiting places she loves and places she has always wanted to go. It just so happens that the places Cassie visits are places I too have loved – Paris and Prague and Rome, and even the hustle and bustle of Tokyo. But as Cassie learns about the dark side to this exciting new world – that there are other magical books that can do wonderful and dreadful things, and people who will do anything things to possess them – events and circumstances lead Cassie and other characters on a trail through a number of different places.

Cafe in New Orleans – great for reading!

Map locations in The Book of Doors

Cassie takes a trip to meet an enigmatic bookseller in a late night New Orleans that is pulsating with noise and tourists and atmosphere. Cassie and Izzie have breakfast with Drummond Fox, a mysterious librarian at a café in Lyon, exactly where my wife and I had breakfast several years ago when we visited the city.

Las Vegas:

Map locations in The Book of Doors

Later in the novel, Cassie’s friends flee from a dreadful evil in New York City by taking a Greyhound bus across country to hide a magical book in the desert outside Las Vegas. And then they hitch-hike along the Pacific West Coast, ending up at small town in Oregon where they sit around a beach fire talking and planning until Cassie finds them again. All of these are places I’ve loved and have fond memories of.

Path to a haunted house and possibly a magical library? Loch Ness Scotland

Map locations in The Book of Doors

Even Scotland, my home country, features. There is a mysterious library in a large country house in the Highlands, a setting directly out of many road trips my wife and I have taken over the years, and hotels and guests houses we have stayed in. In the midst of the Covid pandemic, writing about these places and revisiting fond memories was as good as travelling to them.

The Book of Doors Gareth Brown

Map locations in The Book of Doors

The Book of Doors is all about literal magical books.

However, in our unmagical world it seems to me that the true magic of books is the fact that they can take you away from your troubles. They provide an escape and a distraction, a hiding place even from the tyranny of real life. I was able to escape into writing The Book of Doors for several months during a difficult time.

Hopefully, readers of the book will enjoy the travels and the locations.

I hope they are able to be taken away from their troubles as well.

Thank you Gareth. Be careful about opening your next read! Who knows WHERE you will go!