FRENCH culture and history exude from the pages of two of our shop's favourite summer non-fiction titles. Provence 1970: MFK Fisher, Julia Child, James Beard and the Reinvention of American Taste by Luke Barr focuses on the summer of 1970 when six leading culinary figures found themselves in the south of France at the same time - US chef and food writer James Beard; cook, author and television presenter Julia Child; food writer Mary Francis Kennedy Fisher: Simone Beck, Child's co-author on Mastering The Art of French Cooking; food editor Judith Jones; and French country cooking specialist Richard Olney.

"The small group gathered there was the tightly wound nucleus around which all others orbited in the insular, still-clubby world of food and cooking in 1970," Barr writes. "Their encounters in Provence, in rustic home kitchens, on stone terraces overlooking olive groves, in local restaurants, and at the ubiquitous farmers markets in the surrounding countryside, provide a unique, up-close view of the push and pull of history and personality, of a new world in the making."

Colette's France: Her Lives, Her Loves by Melbourne academic Jane Gilmour presents the story of writer, journalist, performer and businesswoman Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in a highly accessible and beautifully produced hardcover.

For many years, Colette has been the subject of Gilmour's academic research; this book is a promise that "through the places of her heart, we will come to know her".

Many of the crop of new fiction titles evoke a town, a country, a place. Alex Miller's Coal Creek sees the author return to the scrub hinterland of central Queensland - a recurring setting in his work. Born in Britain, Miller lived in this area when he first arrived in Australia as a teenager and has developed a deep understanding of its forests and vegetation, its coarse beauty, and the tough people it nurtures.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North by Richard Flanagan is not necessarily a place that readers will want to visit. It is an important journey, however, and one that its author ensures we will never forget. Celebrated surgeon and Burma Railway prisoner-of-war survivor Dorrigo Evans looks back on his life, the trauma, the key moments, the loves and friendships and wonders: could he have done better?

As the story moves back and forward in time, we visit rural Tasmania, Adelaide's beaches, the stuffy world of Melbourne's establishment, and post-war Japan. But it is the dank, thick Thai jungle that permeates these pages.

Shanghai is the setting for much of the action in Amy Tan's The Valley of Amazement. This haunting story spans 50 years and tells the story of Violet Minturn, a young courtesan who becomes one of Shanghai's most desired women. Once again Tan explores the intricacies of a powerful mother-daughter relationship in this return to her Joy Luck Club best.

One of the year's must-reads is Donna Tartt's The Goldfinch. Set mainly in New York where young Theo Decker's life is forever changed when his mother is killed in a museum bomb blast, the book spends a fair chunk of its mid-story in Las Vegas. This is the hometown of Theo's runaway drug-addicted father.

As Theo searches for the painting of a goldfinch - like him, a survivor of the art gallery massacre - we travel to Amsterdam and its seedy outskirts. But the Vegas memory stays strong; like Theo, we'll never forget the things that happened to him there, nor the people he met. A good book'll always do that.

Corrie Perkin is a Melbourne journalist; she runs My Bookshop by Corrie Perkin at Hawksburn; mybookshop.net.au.

Recommended sense-of-place reading

Non-fiction:The Broken Road by Patrick Leigh Fermor; On the Trail Of Genghis Khan by Tim Cope; Born In A Tent: How Camping Makes Us Australian by Bill Garner; One Summer: America 1927 by Bill Bryson; Italian Ways: On and Off the Rails from Milan to Palermo by Tim Parks; White Beech: The Rainforest Years by Germaine Greer; The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot by Robert Macfarlane; A Bite of the Big Apple by Monica Trapaga and Lil Tulloch; Design Brooklyn by Anne Hellman.

Fiction: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton; The Two Hotel Francforts by David Leavitt; The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vasquez; Rules of Civility by Amor Towles; The Paris Architect by Charles Belfoure; The Embassy of Cambodia by Zadie Smith; Crazy Rich Asians by Kevin Kwan; Bitter Wash Road by Garry Disher.