Mapped
Burmese Days
George Orwell
Orwell's fictional station of Kyauktada is the real town of Katha on the Irrawaddy in Upper Burma, where he served in the Imperial Police in 1926-27. The map holds the small world of the novel: the European Club at its poisonous centre, the bazaar and the maidan, the river and its jetty, and the jungle beyond where Flory keeps his teak camp. It brings Myanmar and the colonial Irrawaddy into the atlas.
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Nineteen Eighty-Four
George Orwell
Oceania's capital is the London Orwell knew in 1948: bomb-scarred, rationed and grey, its landmarks renamed and repurposed by the Party. He built the ministries and squares of Airstrip One from real buildings he had worked in and walked past, so the fictional city maps onto the actual one.
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