Dorothy Dunnett loved to travel and visited almost all the places she brought so vividly to life in her novels. Her readers have followed enthusiastically in her footsteps. Dunnett-inspired travel has become something of a tradition, involving friends and partners brought along for the fictional journey!

The Dorothy Dunnett Guides were created for just such travellers. They help readers follow the extraordinary journeys of the novels: across cities and kingdoms, along trade routes and pilgrim roads, through landscapes that have changed over the centuries and others that feel acutely familiar to the reader.

Researched, written and produced by volunteers from the Society’s Guides Team, each Guide is the result of painstaking detective work, editing and production. The team traces significant journeys from the novels, identifies historical and fictional locations, explores the history behind them and brings that information together with quotations, maps, photographs and historical images. The results are companions to the places Dorothy Dunnett knew, researched and transformed into the settings of her novels.

The Guides are designed for readers who want to visit these places for themselves, helping you discover what to look for and connecting the modern landscape with events and locations in the books. But you don’t have to travel to enjoy them. Rich in research, maps, photographs and details from the novels, they offer an armchair journey too — it is almost as good as being there. So far we have guides for Bruges, Iceland, Edinburgh, Russia, Istanbul, Orkney, the Middle Marches and Venice.