The English Coastline, by Meg Rosoff:

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I'm staring out the window at the sea from my little blue house on the coast of East Anglia, which, for the uninitiated, is that big chunk of England located a couple of hours north of London consisting of Norfolk, Suffolk and parts of Essex.

East Anglia is a moody, mysterious place with a long history of Anglo Saxon and Viking kings, Roman treasure trove (which occasionally turns up in someone's turnip field), and rare birds blown in from Scandinavia. Doctors used to have one of those politically incorrect chart notations that read NFN...or Normal For Norfolk, indicating that the patient had both eyes on the same side of the head, or was possibly related by birth to his/her spouse.

My favourite story of this coast involves King John, who was escaping north from the French invasion of 1216 and sent his luggage on a shortcut across the marsh that separates Norfolk from Lincolnshire - a treacherous, muddy tidal area. In his baggage were the crown jewels - diamonds big as walnuts, solid gold sceptres -- a kind of medieval version of traveller's cheques.

To make a long story short, what with the unpredictable tides and the sucking mud, the servant and the bag of jewels suddenly sank, never to be seen again. For the bounty hunters among you, there's a challenge....

But I digress.

I set my latest book (What I Was) on this coast, in 1962, in a boy's boarding school -- something that inspired a fair bit of muttering from the establishment (an American woman writing about an English boy's boarding school?) But when you think about it, how hard is it to imagine what life was like back then, even if you haven't seen the movie If. Cold showers, uncomfortable clothes, no heat, disgusting food, and sadistic masters. Most of us could write that book.

It helped that I know the setting backwards and forwards, having fallen in love with this coast twenty years ago when I first moved over from the US, and discovered that East Anglia looked a lot like the landscape of my childhood, Cape Cod. And guess what? It's no coincidence. Even the family names of the fisherman on Martha's Vineyard are the same as those in Suffolk.

Mainly I come up here to write - there's no internet, a set-up I hear people pay thousands for at exclusive hotels. It's only because I'm too cheap to pay for it and I love the quiet too much to suffer the kids on Grand Theft Auto all day.

So off to the local library to post this.

Meg Rosoff, What I Was, Plume, Penguin Books