When Booker-longlisted author Paul Murray took his 10-year old son on a trip of a lifetime to New York, he wasn’t expecting the Nintendo store to be the highlight
• Geoff Dyer, Lissa Evans, Joe Dunthorne and more on their favourite holidays in fiction
Last year I spent four months teaching in Boston with my wife and son. It was amazing to immerse ourselves in another culture. It was also amazing, as a freelancer, to get holiday pay, and I wanted to take full advantage of it. When I was growing up in Ireland, my family would spend two weeks every summer in a caravan near Skibbereen. Rain-lashed, defiantly entertainment-free, these trips had no clear objective other than to make us appreciate not being on holiday. They made the world seem smaller, somehow, as if a door had been flung open to reveal a dingy cupboard.
I wanted to give my 10-year-old son a vacation that he’d remember for ever. New York City: surely the opposite of a bleak field in Cork. “It’s where they made Ghostbusters, Spider-Man, Enchanted!” we told him. “It’s literally the most exciting place on Earth!”
