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Real places or fictional settings?
- Lilac Mills
- Feb 7
- 3 min read
Many readers want to know whether I set my books in real places or are the settings entirely fictional.
My answer is – ‘that depends…’
Not helpful, but true.
Take my Island Romance series, for instance; all three books are set on the island of Tenerife, part of the Canaries in the Atlantic. The island is real and so are all the locations mentioned. If you're interested, I've written a blog post where I talk about the scenery and places that appear in the books. Even the villa in the first book is real - although I did have to embellish it rather a lot and use my imagination for the interior.
The setting of Summer on the Turquoise Coast is a resort in Turkiye that is real and is an area I have visited many times. You can read about that here, if you wish. Only the hotel is fictional.
Love in the City by the Sea, my gorgeous novel set in Barcelona, is chock-full of real locations, as is Le Tour de Love, which is set in various parts of France.
Then there's Tabitha Locke's Key to Happiness, which is set in Bath (a beautiful city full of history), written under the name Liz Davies, and I've also set a few books in and around the quaint city of Worcester. And my A Typical Family series of novels are set in various locations from South Wales to Brighton.
Yet, most of my rural novels are located in fictional villages, the most widely read being the Tanglewood series which is set in Wales, near the English border in a picturesque valley surrounded by mountains. The valley is real and so are the mountains - but Tanglewood isn't.
And the same goes for my Foxmore books which are set in North Wales, and the Applewell stories which are set in West Wales
My latest series is set on the stunning Isle of Skye, and although the village of Duncoorie is loosely based on a real place, most of it is pure imagination.
In all of these cases, the villages are fictional but the general areas where they are set, aren’t, like the Llyn Peninsular, for Emily Oak’s Little Black Book, Aberystwyth for Foxmore, and the Sweet Meadow Park series, which bears a passing resemblance to my local park, for instance.
Then we come to the wholly fictional location of the Muddypuddle Lane series of novellas (written under my Etti Summers pen name). Even I’m not sure where this is set! (just joking, I do know, but readers most likely won’t).
From an author’s point of view, there is a very good reason to set in story in a fictional place. I decide what goes in it, where the pub is, where the river flows and what shops and other buildings are there. If I set a book in a real village, I'd feel it was important to keep everything as accurate as possible and this mightn’t work for the story I want to tell.
So, you now see what I mean when I say 'it depends' in answer to the 'real places or entirely fictional?' question.
But there is one thing I'm absolutely convinced of - these cosy little fictional villages of mine feel very real to me when I'm writing about them. And I hope they feel equally real to my readers.
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About the Author
Lilac Mills writes heartwarming romance inspired by life in the Welsh countryside, her love of simple pleasures, and the beauty of everyday moments.
She’s the author of over twenty feel-good novels, and also writes as Liz Davies and Etti Summers.
You have travelled to many places with your writing. It sounds as if you are in your happy place when you create your cosy villages and readers will feel that too. Jessie