Top ten atmospheric settings in fiction

Helen Grant is a highly acclaimed YA author. Her latest novel is Demons of Ghent, the second book in the Forbidden Spaces trilogy.

One of Grant's ten "best books with settings that are strikingly brought to life," as shared at the Guardian:

Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi

The setting of Ship Breaker is not so much creepy as threatening. In a future where fossil fuels have run out and the rich sail about in super-fast clipper ships, the carcasses of oil tankers are mined for copper wiring and other useful parts by teenager scavengers. Hair clipped short to avoid it being caught in machinery, they wriggle through bakingly hot and grimy ducts full of asbestos fibres, loose wires and dead rats. Appallingly claustrophobic, this is one setting you won't forget in a hurry.

Read about another entry on the list.

Writers Read: Paolo Bacigalupi (March 2010).

--Marshal Zeringue