She lived in Morocco from age four to six, then moved to Sussex, where she spent 10 years. When she was 16 the family moved to London, where she studied drama. After various writing courses at the City Lit, she "did that thing of sitting down every day" and wrote Hideous Kinky (1992), which was shortlisted for the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and made into a film starring Kate Winslet. Peerless Flats appeared in 1993, when she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. Her other novels are Gaglow (1997), shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Prize, and The Wild (2000), which she is currently adapting for film.

Her new novel, The Sea House (Hamish Hamilton), is published this week Esther Freud divides her time between London and Suffolk. She lives with the actor David Morrissey and their two children.. In spirit if not in setting, fiction inspired by holidays tilts towards the upmarket end of the trade. Even those cheerful beach-based romances clad in ice-cream jackets will shift, mid-plot, into the great Romantic motifs of quest, choice and self-discovery. Standard-issue ChickLit has this in common with Woolf or Forster: the voyage out diverts to become a voyage within the hero/ine. That cherished room with a view ends up as more of a mirror than an observation-post.

Perhaps this introspective bias makes for more cogent, satisfying novels. It does, all the same, mean that most writers overlook vast tracts of the modern tourist landscape. Since we don't any longer do military service, and even huge employers now try to act small, holiday transit offers (along with some NHS hospitals) instant entry into a theme-park of 19th-century people-control. Even if you shun the perfectly named "package" experience of barracks hotels and dragooned excursions, an assault-course of punishing queues, checks and interrogations hauls you back into the world of the Victorian conscript or factory-hand.Did the late philosopher of social coercion, Michel Foucault, ever write about the tyranny of the airport-hotel-beach apparatus? He should have done, as fiction-writers seldom bother - even when holiday destinations lend them both their colour and content. I've never understood why Finding Yourself should count as a perennial topic, but not the (often far more turbulent) business of Getting There.There are some splendid exceptions. You can read much of J G Ballard, with his eerie terminal beaches and hotels from hell, as one extended commentary on the dystopian aspect of mass tourism.