A few years ago on Radio 4’s Front Row, Mark Lawson conducted a memorable interview with the author Sid Smith who had won the Whitbread First Novel award for his book Something Like a House. Set in China during the Cultural Revolution, the novel was widely praised for its evocation of peasant life - a China of stony buffalo fields and cooking pots ”crouched on three stones”, where villagers kept out draughts by sticking paper to their windows with boiled rice glue and men negotiated the price of a buffalo by counting each other’s fingers inside one of their coats. Lawson, impressed by Smith’s depiction, asked if he spoke fluent Mandarin. Smith said no, he didn’t speak Chinese. Lawson asked if he had worked in China. No, he hadn’t. At this point Lawson became agitated. ”But you’ve been to China,” he said. There was a short pause, followed by Smith’s calm assertion that no, actually, he had never been to China.

Lawson was right to be astounded. Although set in the past and told through an English army deserter, Jim Fraser (who quickly takes to the primitive ways of his adopted Miao tribe), Something Like a House is full of odd details about life in China that you’d think would take years of first-hand experience to note. Not just physical things, such as the river sand in the bottom of a cup of tea, but social niceties such as Madame Tao judging her neighbours by how far up the valley they collect their water.

What was most enjoyable about the interview, though, was not Lawson’s surprise but Smith’s refusal to be even slightly apologetic. He found his China in the London Library, and from films, newspapers and the internet. Who’s to say that this gave him any less valid a picture of China than one he might have gained on a trip to Beijing? Besides, he hadn’t written a biography of China; this was fiction, and made no overt claim to historical or geographical fact.

Smith has now written a trilogy of novels about China. The last, China Dreams, is set in London but is, ironically, about a young man’s obsession with all things Chinese, starting with the daughter of the owner of the local Chinese takeaway. According to Smith’s agent, his only first-hand experience of China remains a one-hour stopover in Hong Kong.

Our fascination with Smith and other novelists who choose to set their books in countries they haven’t been to is in part an admiration for their audacity. Intriguingly, they are often first-time novelists. Write what you know, our teachers used to insist, but here are writers who dare to do otherwise. Yet our admiration is often accompanied - and sometimes overtaken - by a sense that we are somehow being cheated; that the author is performing a confidence trick.

The most recent novel to inspire this mixture of admiration and woundedness is Stef Penney’s The Tenderness of Wolves - interestingly enough, the 2006 overall winner of the Costa Awards, formerly called the Whitbread. Set in the icy wilderness of Northern Ontario, Penney’s novel is essentially a whodunnit. A wolf bounty-hunter, Laurence Jammet, is found murdered and at the same time a local boy goes missing. Mrs Ross, the boy’s mother, sets off into the snowbound forests to find him and prove his innocence, with the help of an Indian tracker. It’s a novel in which the landscape plays a crucial part. As individuals pit themselves against this ”great lone land” and its fierce weather, we see their characters emerge - stoic men of few words, humbled by the vast frozen wastes; frustrated women living limited, disappointed lives; native Canadian Indians who are always one step ahead. Penney is not Canadian and, being agoraphobic, was unable to fly to Canada. She also found her Canada in a library. ”Couldn’t ring truer,” said Nicholas Lezard in The Guardian. But Marcel Berlins in the same paper said he felt ”short-changed and disappointed” knowing that Penney had not been there.

Like Smith, Penney excuses herself slightly by setting the novel in 1867 - a place no author can get to. Also like Smith, she uses outsiders’ eyes to see through - Mrs Ross, and most of the inhabitants of the frontier settlement, are Scottish immigrants (Penney herself is Scottish). She notices what they would notice - the surprise of iced-up moustaches, how quickly a cup of tea loses its heat in sub-zero temperatures, how Mrs Ross’s face and chest burn at the campfire while her back freezes, how Donald’s spectacles ”really... are not the thing for Canada, always frosting or steaming up at the wrong moments”.

When she ventures into more alien viewpoints, she is on shakier territory. A young native Indian, Jacob, muses on his Scottish friend Donald’s ”peculiar questions”: ”He is constantly asking what [Jacob] thinks of this and that. Of course it is normal to be asked what you think of the weather, or the prospects for hunting, say, or a journey time, but Donald prefers to talk about things that are vague and unimportant, like a story he has just read, or a remark that someone made two days ago.” It may be that a Canadian Indian finds Donald’s abstract questions strange, but would he use ”say” in such an English way, or even ”remark”, with its connotations of judgment? She’s not giving us Jacob’s speech, but Penney is nevertheless transcribing the texture and rhythm of his thoughts.

Of course novelists must be allowed to step beyond their realm of experience. When a character fixes his teeth in the groove of his well-worn pipe, Penney is presumably calling on her imagination rather than her pipe-smoking experience. We have no problem believing her. If novelists were not allowed to stray beyond their experience, the familiar argument goes, men could not write from the point of view of a woman (and vice versa). We would not have Anna Karenina and Emma Bovary. We would also not have historical fiction, or sci-fi, or much of children’s fiction. Imagination - or the extent to which an author can put him or herself in someone else’s shoes - is what makes a novel great. Why should the rules be any different for where the novelist chooses to place those shoes?

A novel often cited as exemplary in depicting place is Waterland, Graham Swift’s 1983 saga of several generations of Fenlanders. The Crick family lacks ambition and drive, driven to ”unquiet and sleep-defeating thoughts” by the insistently flat, monotonous land, and made sluggish by the preponderance of silt; while the Atkinsons, who live on the only hill, get ”Ideas”, spot gaps in the market, and make a fortune brewing beer. As an example of how landscapes shape characters it is perhaps unmatched in contemporary fiction. Yet Swift is not a Fenlander, and according to his agent made ”only a few actual visits” to the Fens after he’d begun his novel. Swift lives in London and presumably could have travelled to the Fens more often had he wished to. Is it possible that a partial knowledge of the place suited him? Perhaps knowing too much enabled him to package the landscape for fiction more neatly, finding cause and effect in its topography and ever-shifting waterways. Would he have been able to write Waterland, in fact, if he had been a Fenlander?

”Writers write by trying to find out what it is they’re writing,” believes the American novelist E.L. Doctorow. He wrote his own first novel, a western, ”never having been west of Ohio”. With the aid of a book called The Great Plains, he was able to write ”because I had not planned to, and because I was not qualified to”. The result, Welcome to Hard Times, is a wholly satisfying example of the genre.

Such an approach is, of course, vulnerable to errors. After it came out an old lady from Texas wrote to Doctorow to say that she could tell he’d never been out west because of the character who ”made himself a dinner of the roasted haunch of a prairie dog”; a prairie dog’s haunch, she said, ”wouldn’t fill a teaspoon”. Doctorow was delighted with his error, and let the line stand in future editions, being ”leery of perfection”. Too much accuracy, he realised, might suck the life out. Apparently Kafka had much the same attitude. His first novel, Amerika, was written without the author leaving Prague - its protagonist, a new immigrant, looks out over New York and the bridge that ”connected New York and Boston”.

Too ardent a straining for accuracy is a charge that could be levelled at Phil Whitaker’s first novel, Eclipse of the Sun, published in 1997. It went on to win a Betty Trask award, the John Llewellyn Rhys prize and, yet again, make a Whitbread shortlist. Set in a fictional town in an imagined India (Whitaker has said that he couldn’t afford to go to the real India), the novel has clearly been meticulously researched. He has grasped the implied insult of answering in English a question posed in Marathi; that a man’s eyes immediately take in the absence of a vermillion stain on a woman’s parting and its message of availability; that Indians love the word ”auspicious”. He gives us bidis and ikkas, crores and lakhs, plates of jalebi and the performances of yagnas while resisting the urge to explain. The BBC’s India correspondent Mark Tully found no fault in its depiction of smalltown India. Yet Whitaker runs the risk of making his characters too Indian, too perfect: he pits husband Rajesh, a member of The Rational Thinking Indian Association, against his traditionally religious wife Sumila; she performs her daily puja, he chews paan, and so on.

Perhaps if Whitaker had been to India he would have found a people that were odder, less typical, than the country he discovered through research. Or perhaps, if he’d gone to India, he wouldn’t have written the book at all - he might have been made aware of how much he did not know. It is possible that setting a novel in a country you’ve never been to is something only first-time, and therefore mostly young, novelists are audacious enough to do. Does humility get in the way later on? Or do older writers simply know better? There is something telling about Smith’s decision to bring his third China novel back to London, and explore instead the madness inherent in a man’s obsession with a never-seen, exotic land.

Perhaps all that matters in the end is that the writer pulls off the confidence trick. We’ll believe anything if it’s authoritative enough. And we, as readers, need to be clear about why we are reading. If we want to know about Canada, we should go to Canada, or read a non-fiction account. But if we want to read how someone else sees Canada (and life in general), then we can read Stef Penney’s novel - and not worry about where it came from.

Susan Elderkin is author of ”The Voices” (Fourth Estate).

Something Like a House

by Sid Smith

Picador £6.99, 224 pages

FT bookshop price: £5.59

China Dreams

by Sid Smith

Picador £12.99, 192 pages

FT bookshop price: £10.39

The Tenderness of Wolves

by Stef Penney

Quercus £7.99, 466 pages

FT bookshop price: £6.39

Waterland

by Graham Swift,

Picador £7.99, 368 pages

FT bookshop price: £6.39

Eclipse of the Sun

by Phil Whitaker

Phoenix £6.99 264 pages

FT bookshop price: £5.59