Mapped
101 Reykjavík
Hallgrímur Helgason
Hlynur Björn, a thirtyish layabout who still lives with his mother, drifts through the bars, screens and hangovers of downtown Reykjavík, his aimless world upended when his mother's lover moves in. Helgason maps the real 101 postal district that gives the book its name: the flat in the old centre, the shopping and bar street of Laugavegur, the downtown pubs of the weekend rúntur, and the little lake of Tjörnin at the city's heart.
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A Bend in the River
V. S. Naipaul
Salim, a Muslim of Indian descent, buys a shop in a town at a bend of the great river in the interior of a newly independent central African country, and watches the fragile post-colonial order rise and rot under the rule of the Big Man. Naipaul's unnamed town is drawn from Kisangani on the Congo: the river and its choking water hyacinths, the market and the shop, the Big Man's shiny new Domain on the edge of the bush, and the far-off capital from which power and terror flow.
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A Confederacy of Dunces
John Kennedy Toole
Toole's New Orleans is a hot, cluttered comic stage: a medievalist crank in a hunting cap wages war on the modern world from his mother's shotgun house Uptown out to the department-store clock on Canal Street, the neon of Bourbon Street, the French Quarter where he peddles hot dogs, and a failing pants factory down by the river. The map runs from Uptown across the Central Business District and French Quarter to Bywater.
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A Fine Balance
Rohinton Mistry
Mistry never names the city by the sea, but its stations, promenade and slums are unmistakably 1970s Bombay, today's Mumbai. Under the 1975-77 Emergency the map runs from a great railway terminus and a seafront drive out to the pavement stretches and the bulldozed slum colony where two tailors, fleeing caste violence in an inland village, try to hold a life together.
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A House for Mr Biswas
V. S. Naipaul
One man's lifelong search for a house of his own, across colonial Trinidad. The map runs from the sugar country of Caroni where Mohun Biswas is born, through the market town of Chaguanas and the family compound he marries into, to the capital, Port of Spain, and the small house in St James that is finally his.
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A Passage to India
E. M. Forster
A young Englishwoman and an Indian doctor meet across the divide of the Raj, and a walk in the caves ends in an accusation that pulls the whole civil station apart. The invented city of Chandrapore is drawn from Bankipore, the British civil station beside Patna on the Ganges, where Forster stayed; the Marabar Caves are his version of the real Barabar Caves, the ancient rock-cut caves in the hills near Gaya that he visited. The final section moves west to the Hindu princely state of Mau, drawn from Dewas and Chhatarpur in Central India, where Forster served.
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A Room with a View
E. M. Forster
A young Englishwoman on the Grand Tour is unsettled by Florence and by a fellow guest at her pension, and the feeling follows her home. Part One maps the real city: a pension on the Arno embankment, the church of Santa Croce, the Piazza della Signoria where she faints, and the violet-covered slopes at Fiesole. Part Two moves to the Surrey hills near Dorking, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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Absalom, Absalom!
William Faulkner
Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, Mississippi, and its county seat, Jefferson, from Oxford, the town where Faulkner lived and is buried. This novel maps the rise and ruin of Thomas Sutpen: his plantation twelve miles out in the county, the town that watched him, and the graves he left. Much of the story is told and retold decades later, some of it from a cold room at Harvard, so the map runs from the courthouse square out into the county and once far north to Cambridge.
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Abyssinian Chronicles
Moses Isegawa
Isegawa's Uganda runs from a Catholic childhood in the Buganda countryside south of the capital, through the boarding seminary, and into Kampala itself: the seven hills, the markets and the slums, and the fear of the Amin and Obote years. The map holds to the real Ugandan geography the novel walks, before its narrator finally leaves for the Netherlands.
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Alamut
Vladimir Bartol
In eleventh-century Persia, Hasan-i Sabbah, the Old Man of the Mountain, builds the sect of the Assassins at the fortress of Alamut, and makes his young fedayeen die on command by convincing them, through a hidden garden of drugged pleasures, that he can send them to paradise and back. Bartol sets it at the real crag of Alamut in the Alborz mountains: the fortress itself, the secret gardens behind it, the training grounds of the fedayeen, and the roads down which the assassins are sent against the great men of the age.
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Ali and Nino
Kurban Said
Kurban Said's Baku sits on the line between Europe and Asia, an oil city on the Caspian where a Muslim boy and a Christian girl try to build a life across faiths. The map holds the walled Old City and its Maiden Tower, the boom-era mansions and the seaside boulevard, then reaches inland to the mountain town of Shusha and closes at Ganja, as a short-lived Azerbaijani republic rises and falls.
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Allah Is Not Obliged
Ahmadou Kourouma
Birahima, a foul-mouthed ten-year-old orphan from the Malinké country of northern Côte d'Ivoire, sets out to find his aunt and is swept into the 1990s civil wars of Liberia and Sierra Leone, becoming a child soldier passed from warlord to warlord. Kourouma maps a real and terrible West Africa: the boy's home in the north, the border crossing into war, the warlord camps of Liberia, and the diamond fields of Sierra Leone, all narrated in a child's blunt, dictionary-quoting voice.
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American Visa
Juan de Recacoechea
A noir of the real altiplano capital: a provincial schoolteacher lands in the thin air of La Paz to chase a United States visa, gets stuck, and drifts down through the cheap hotels, pool halls, brothels, markets and cafes of the steep lower town. The map runs from the political heart at Plaza Murillo and the church of San Francisco down the Prado to the rough hostel quarter and out to the queue at the American embassy.
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Anil's Ghost
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's Sri Lanka is a country under the pressure of civil war in the late 1980s and early 1990s, seen through a forensic investigation. The map runs from the capital, Colombo, up the central axis to the ancient Buddhist ruins and monasteries of the north-central plain and out to the tea-country hills, where the war's disappearances surface as bones.
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Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery
Avonlea is invented, but Montgomery built it from Cavendish on Prince Edward Island, where the farmhouse she had in mind is now the preserved Green Gables Heritage Place, the most visited place on the island. The bbox runs from the north-shore Cavendish landscape south to Charlottetown, the real capital where Anne sits her Queen's exams. The first book here set in Canada.
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Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress
Dai Sijie
During the Cultural Revolution, two teenage sons of denounced doctors are sent for re-education to a remote mountain village in Sichuan, where they haul coal, work the paddies, and discover a hidden suitcase of forbidden Western novels that changes everything, above all for the tailor's daughter one of them loves. Dai Sijie, himself sent to the Sichuan hills, draws on that real world of re-education: the mountain village, the mine and the fields, the tailor's house, and the county town far below.
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Beloved
Toni Morrison
A house on the free side of the Ohio River, haunted by a mother's choice under slavery. The map runs from the Kentucky plantation of the past, across the river into Ohio, out to a house and a clearing on the northern edge of Cincinnati, and back to the downtown riverfront where the real case behind the novel unfolded.
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Berlin Alexanderplatz
Alfred Döblin
Döblin's Berlin is the loud, crowded capital of the late Weimar years, mapped by its real squares, tram lines and back-street bars as an ex-convict tries to go straight and keeps being pulled under. The route runs from the Tegel prison gate in the north-west, through the Scheunenviertel and the great hub of Alexanderplatz, out to the northern asylum where the story ends.
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Black Rain
Masuji Ibuse
Years after the atomic bombing, Shigematsu Shizuma reconstructs from his diary the days after 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima, as he tries to clear his niece Yasuko, who was caught in the radioactive black rain, of the suspicion of illness that is ruining her marriage prospects. Ibuse maps the real catastrophe: the city on the morning of the bomb, the hypocenter and the ruined streets, the rivers of the Ota delta filled with the dead as the black rain falls, and the quiet country village where the survivors wait, years later, for sickness to declare itself.
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Blood Meridian
Cormac McCarthy
The novel follows a nameless runaway, the Kid, out of the East Texas pine country and into the desert borderlands of 1849 and 1850, where he falls in with the Glanton gang, a company of scalp-hunters paid by Mexican authorities to bring in Apache dead. Their route runs across the real Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, from Chihuahua City through the abandoned mines of New Mexico to the Colorado River ferry at Yuma, and closes years later on the Texas plains. The map traces that route soberly; the book's violence is historical and extreme.
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Bonjour Tristesse
Françoise Sagan
A single hot summer on the Côte d'Azur, between Cannes and Saint-Tropez, where a seventeen-year-old girl, her widowed father and his lovers idle at a rented white villa above a pine-fringed cove. The map runs along the real Mediterranean coast and the red cliffs of the Estérel, from the resort towns of the drives and the nights out to the corniche where the summer turns to tragedy.
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Border Town
Shen Congwen
Shen Congwen's lyrical pastoral is set in the little ferry town of Chadong, on a river in the far west of Hunan near the borders of Sichuan and Guizhou, where the orphan girl Cuicui lives with her grandfather, the old ferryman, and comes shyly of age between two brothers who both love her. The real West Hunan landscape is the whole book: the rope ferry over the green stream, the white pagoda above it, the little riverside town and its dragon-boat festival, and the encircling hills.
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Brideshead Revisited
Evelyn Waugh
Charles Ryder's memoir of the Catholic, aristocratic Flyte family between the wars. It begins in the sunlit Oxford of his undergraduate years, opens out to the vast baroque country house he calls Brideshead, and returns to the London and the faith he cannot leave behind. The map runs from the Oxford quads north to the Yorkshire house that stands in for Brideshead, with the family's town house in St James's and a youthful summer in Venice.
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Brighton Rock
Graham Greene
A razor-gang thriller set in the seaside Brighton of the 1930s, where the seventeen-year-old gangster Pinkie kills a man in the Whitsun crowds and marries a waitress, Rose, to keep her from testifying, while the cheerful Ida Arnold sets out to bring him down. Greene maps the town precisely: the Palace Pier where it starts, the racecourse where the gangs slash each other, the grand seafront hotels of the rival boss Colleoni, and the poor streets off Nelson Place that made Pinkie what he is. The chase ends on the cliffs at Peacehaven, east of town.
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Broad and Alien Is the World
Ciro Alegría
The great indigenista novel of the Andes follows the highland Indian community of Rumi, led by the wise old mayor Rosendo Maqui, as a rapacious landowner seizes their communal land and scatters them into a hostile world of mines, plantations and jungle. Alegría maps the real Peruvian sierra and its beyond: the mountain community and its fields, the landowner's hacienda, and the far mines and rubber forests to which the dispossessed are driven, learning how broad and alien the world is for the landless.
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Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
A Hanseatic grain-merchant family declines over four generations in a Baltic city Mann never names but rebuilds street by street. It is unmistakably his native Lübeck: the family's grand house on Mengstraße, the Marienkirche where they worship, the Holstentor and the quays along the Trave, and Travemünde at the river mouth where Tony holidays. The map runs from the old-town islands north-east to the Baltic resort, and brings Germany into the atlas.
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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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Cannery Row
John Steinbeck
A few hundred yards of the Monterey waterfront during the Depression, when the street was a run of sardine canneries, flophouses and grocery stores between the bay and the hill. Steinbeck maps his real neighbours onto invented names: Doc's Western Biological is Ed Ricketts's Pacific Biological Laboratories, still standing on the street now named Cannery Row; Lee Chong's grocery, the Palace Flophouse and Dora's Bear Flag are drawn from the shops and houses of ill repute that really lined it. The tide pools where Doc collects run out to the tip of the peninsula at Point Pinos.
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Captain Corelli's Mandolin
Louis de Bernières
On the Ionian island of Cephalonia during the Second World War, the doctor's daughter Pelagia falls in love with Captain Antonio Corelli, an Italian officer of the occupying garrison who leads his men in an opera club and plays the mandolin. The island is real and central: the capital at Argostoli where the Italians are based, the port of Sami, Mount Aenos above the villages, and the coast where the fisherman Mandras swims. History closes in with the German massacre of the Italians in 1943 and the great earthquake of 1953.
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Changes
Ama Ata Aidoo
Aidoo's spare, sharp love story follows Esi, a successful Accra statistician who leaves a husband she finds stifling, only to become the second wife of a charming businessman and confront afresh the bargains marriage demands of a modern African woman. The real city frames it: the government office where Esi works, the comfortable bungalows of the professional class, the businessman Ali's downtown enterprise, and the restaurants and streets of a booming Accra caught between tradition and change.
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Children of Gebelawi
Naguib Mahfouz
Mahfouz builds a single fictional alley, and the whole of scripture and history play out inside it: a founding ancestor in a great house at the desert edge, an endowment fought over by strongmen, and a line of reformers who each try to win the poor their share. The alley is drawn from the Gamaliya of his own childhood, the old Islamic quarter below the Muqattam hills, near the mosque of al-Husayn and the northern gate of Bab al-Futuh.
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Chronicle in Stone
Ismail Kadare
A boy watches his ancient stone city on its mountainside change hands again and again, Italians, Greeks, Italians, Greeks, Germans, in the chaos of the Second World War. Kadare's own Gjirokastër is the whole book: the steep grey stone houses with their cisterns and slate roofs, the castle brooding over the town, the aerodrome the Italians cut into the plain below, and the old bazaar where the city's life and rumour churn.
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Cities of Salt
Abdelrahman Munif
When Americans arrive to drill for oil, the timeless desert oasis of Wadi al-Uyoun is bulldozed away and its people scattered, many washing up in the raw coastal boomtown of Harran, remade by the oil economy into a place of camps, wages and grievance. Munif's great banned epic of the Arabian oil age is drawn from the real eastern province of Saudi Arabia: the vanished oasis of the interior, the coming of the machines, and the segregated oil town on the Gulf where a new and bitter world is born.
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Cloudstreet
Tim Winton
Two rural families, the Pickles and the Lambs, wash up together in a big rambling house in working-class inner Perth and share it for twenty years. The map runs from the Lambs' lost country home in the south-west, into the shared house and its shop in the western suburbs, out to the wartime city on Perth Water, and always back to the Swan River, where a boy drowns at the start and is made whole at the end.
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Cold Mountain
Charles Frazier
Near the end of the Civil War, a wounded Confederate deserter named Inman walks home across North Carolina to Cold Mountain, the real peak in the Shining Rock Wilderness of Haywood County, and to Ada, who is struggling to keep her dead father's farm at Black Cove alive with the help of the drifter Ruby. The mountain and its community are real; the farm is invented and set at its foot. Inman's long journey west, from a Confederate hospital in Raleigh across the rivers of the Piedmont, runs as a chain of scenes outside the home setting.
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Conversation in the Cathedral
Mario Vargas Llosa
Over a single four-hour conversation in a grimy Lima bar called La Catedral, the disillusioned journalist Santiago Zavala and his father's old chauffeur Ambrosio reconstruct the corruption of Peru under the dictatorship of Manuel Odría. From that table the book fans out across the real city: the university of San Marcos where Santiago is radicalised, the government palace and secret police that run the regime, the wealthy district of Miraflores where the Zavalas live, and the newsroom where Santiago's own compromises are made. Its question hangs over everything: at what moment had Peru screwed itself up?
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Cracking India
Bapsi Sidhwa
Through the eyes of Lenny, a small, polio-stricken Parsee girl, the novel watches Lahore tear itself apart in the Partition of 1947, as her beloved Hindu nanny is betrayed by a besotted admirer, the Ice-candy-man. Sidhwa maps her city: the Parsee family's house on Warris Road, the Queen's Garden and the Mall where the nanny's many suitors gather, the old neighbourhoods that erupt in slaughter, and Hira Mandi, into whose brothels the abducted are sold.
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Cry, the Beloved Country
Alan Paton
A Zulu country pastor leaves the green hills above Ixopo in Natal for the vast city on the gold Reef, hunting for a son swallowed by its townships and shanties. The map holds the Johannesburg of the 1940s: black freehold at Sophiatown, the crowding of Alexandra, the shack settlement thrown up overnight at Orlando, the mines that pulled every man there, and the court where the story turns. The rural home that opens and closes the book lies far south in Natal, held on the map as a separate anchor.
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Crystal Boys
Pai Hsien-yung
Expelled from home for his sexuality, the young A-Qing joins the hidden community of gay youths who gather after dark in Taipei's New Park, a secret 'kingdom of the night' with its own laws and legends. Pai maps the real city of the early 1970s: New Park with its lotus pond, the bar the outcasts open together, the family homes and military-dependents' villages they are cast out of, and the neon nightlife of Ximending.
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Death and the Penguin
Andrey Kurkov
Post-Soviet Kyiv in the mid-1990s: a broke city where the zoo gives its animals away, a lonely writer keeps a king penguin in his flat, and a job writing obituaries pulls him into a quiet, lethal machinery of favours and funerals. The map runs from the residential streets of the centre out to the zoo on Prospekt Peremohy and down to the frozen Dnieper.
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Death Comes for the Archbishop
Willa Cather
Archbishop Latour's New Mexico Territory of the 1850s, from the plaza and the cathedral he raises at Santa Fé, out to the sky-city of Ácoma on its mesa, up to rebel Taos and down through Albuquerque. Cather names the real pueblos, towns and missions; the bbox spans northern New Mexico from Ácoma and Albuquerque up to Taos.
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Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
An ageing German writer travels south for rest and is caught by the beauty of a boy he never speaks to, staying on as a cholera the city hushes up spreads through the summer. The map crosses the lagoon from the San Marco waterfront to the Lido, the barrier island of grand hotels and sea baths, and back into the sultry, sirocco-laden alleys of the old city.
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Disgrace
J. M. Coetzee
The novel's reckoning happens in the Eastern Cape. A disgraced Cape Town academic retreats to his daughter's smallholding on the dry veld near Salem, between the old settler town of Grahamstown, now Makhanda, and the coast. The map anchors that country of hills, farm plots and a small-town animal clinic; the Cape Town scenes of his fall sit far to the west and are marked as excursions.
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Divine Punishment
Sergio Ramírez
The provincial León of the early Somoza years, mapped through a sensational poisoning trial: a compact colonial grid of cathedral and plaza, courthouse and pharmacy, the grand houses of the local elite and the railway station that ties the town to the coast. Ramírez maps a real city, and the map keeps to its streets.
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Doctor Glas
Hjalmar Söderberg
A lonely Stockholm physician keeps a diary through one bright summer as he comes to contemplate murder: to free a young woman, Helga, from the repulsive husband, Pastor Gregorius, who forces himself on her. Söderberg's city is exact and atmospheric: the doctor's consulting rooms in the centre, the Old Town church where the pastor serves, the park island of Djurgården where Glas broods on his walks, and the palace waterfront under the endless northern light.
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Doctor Zhivago
Boris Pasternak
A life pulled apart by history: a Moscow doctor and poet is carried from his family's city through revolution and famine, then east by train across Russia to the towns and forests of the Urals, where he loves Lara. The map runs from central Moscow more than a thousand kilometres to Perm, the real Ural city that stands behind the novel's Yuriatin, and to the taiga beyond it.
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Dogeaters
Jessica Hagedorn
Hagedorn's Manila is a city told in fragments: the air-conditioned movie palaces and department stores of the downtown Avenue, the perfumed nightclubs of Ermita, the vast slums of Tondo, and the guarded gates of Malacanang, all held together by radio soaps, imported films and the daily violence of the Marcos years. The map runs across the old heart of the city, from the river districts of Binondo and Santa Cruz south to Ermita and east to the presidential palace.
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Don Goyo
Demetrio Aguilera Malta
On the mangrove islands of the Guayas river delta near Guayaquil, the mixed-race cholo fishermen and woodcutters live in near-mystical communion with the swamps and their ancient patriarch, Don Goyo, a figure old as the mangroves themselves. Aguilera Malta, a pioneer of Latin American magical realism, roots it in the real estuary: the island villages, the mangrove swamps the cholos harvest, the river and its canoes, and the distant city of Guayaquil whose market and traders press them to cut the forest down.
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Doña Bárbara
Rómulo Gallegos
The flooded savannah of Apure, where a Caracas lawyer comes home to a cattle ranch on the Arauca and finds a neighbour who has been swallowing his land. The map runs from the provincial capital and seat of law at San Fernando de Apure west across the open llanos to the great river, with the two rival ranches set among the plains between them.
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Dubliners
James Joyce
Fifteen stories, fifteen corners of one city, each with a real address. From a boy's blind street in the north inner city to the aunts' house on the Liffey quays, Joyce mapped Dublin so exactly you can still walk it.
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El Señor Presidente
Miguel Ángel Asturias
Asturias never names the capital, but its cathedral, its central plaza and the presidential palace on the plaza's edge make it unmistakably Guatemala City, drawn from the dictatorship of Manuel Estrada Cabrera in the early 1900s. The map runs from the cathedral porch where beggars shelter, across the plaza to the seat of power, down to the prison and the poor quarters, and out to the hill where the land breaks toward the mountains and the border.
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Empire of the Sun
J. G. Ballard
Ballard's wartime Shanghai, drawn from his own childhood: a boy is cut loose from his parents when the Japanese seize the city after Pearl Harbour. The map runs from the family villa in the western suburbs, through the International Settlement of the Bund and Nanking Road, out to the internment camp beside the Lunghua pagoda and airfield where he waits out the war.
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Family
Ba Jin
Ba Jin's landmark novel of youth in revolt is set in the great feudal Gao household of 1920s Chengdu, where three grandsons chafe against the tyranny of the patriarch and the weight of the old ways, and the young women around them are destroyed by them. The real city frames it: the sprawling family compound with its courtyards and garden lake, the Chengdu streets alive with student demonstrations and new ideas, and the river down which the youngest brother finally escapes.
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Fatelessness
Imre Kertész
In 1944 the fourteen-year-old Budapest Jew György Köves is pulled off a bus, deported, and survives Auschwitz, Buchenwald and the Zeitz labour camp with a bewildered, matter-of-fact detachment, before returning to a city that wants him to forget. Kertész, who lived it, maps the real geography of the catastrophe: the yellow-star house and the assembly points of Budapest, and the camps to the north where a boy learns to take each step of the machinery as, somehow, natural.
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Fatelessness
Imre Kertész
The wartime Budapest of a fifteen-year-old boy who is marked, taken and deported in the summer of 1944. The map holds the ordinary points of his last free weeks, a Pest flat, an apprentice job across the river at Csepel, and the brickyard on the northern edge where a stopped bus ends the ordinary. From there the novel travels out of the frame to the camps and, at the last, returns to a city that has changed while he was gone.
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For Bread Alone
Mohamed Choukri
Choukri's Tangier is the hungry underside of the international city: the Grand Socco and Petit Socco markets, the alleys of the medina, the working port, and the cafés and back rooms of the interzone. The map runs from the famine-struck Rif countryside near Nador, which drives the family west to the coast, through the streets where the boy survives, out to a spell in Tetouan.
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Fortress Besieged
Qian Zhongshu
Qian Zhongshu's great comic novel follows Fang Hongjian, home from Europe with a bought diploma, through the pretensions of 1930s Shanghai society, a farcical journey to a shabby university in the interior, and a marriage that proves the book's famous image: a besieged fortress, which those outside want to storm and those inside want to escape. The city anchors it, its returning ships, salons and matchmaking, before the long trek inland and the disillusioned return.
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Four Reigns
Kukrit Pramoj
Through the long life of Mae Phloi, from a girl sent to serve in the royal Inner Court to a grandmother in the Second World War, Kukrit Pramoj tells the story of Siam across the reigns of four kings and its passage from old kingdom to modern nation. Bangkok is the whole book: the Grand Palace and its Inner Court where Phloi grows up, the canal-laced city of the old capital, the Chao Phraya river, and the modernising, then war-shadowed, city of her old age.
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From a Crooked Rib
Nuruddin Farah
Ebla, a young orphan nomad girl, flees an arranged marriage to an old man and journeys out of the Ogaden bushland to the town of Beledweyne and on to Mogadishu, where she is passed between husbands and struggles to claim some measure of freedom in a society that treats women as property. Farah's first novel, and a landmark of Somali literature, follows her across a real geography on the eve of independence: the pastoral interior, the river town, and the coastal capital.
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Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon
Jorge Amado
In the cocoa-boom port of Ilhéus on the Bahia coast around 1925, two stories run together: the Syrian bar-owner Nacib's love for his cinnamon-skinned cook Gabriela, and the town's struggle between the old cocoa colonels and the modernisers who want to open the harbour bar to ocean ships. Amado maps his own city: the bars and cathedral square of Ilhéus, the treacherous sandbar at the harbour mouth, and the cocoa plantations inland whose blood-soaked wealth built the whole coast.
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Gate of the Sun
Elias Khoury
In the Shatila refugee camp in Beirut, after the 1982 massacre, the makeshift doctor Khalil keeps vigil over the comatose old fighter Yunes, telling him the interwoven stories of the Palestinian catastrophe. The frame is the camp; the tales range back to the Galilee villages emptied in 1948, to the cave called Bab al-Shams where Yunes crossed the border to meet his wife, and to the long exile in Lebanon, holding a whole people's memory in one dying man's room.
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God's Bits of Wood
Ousmane Sembène
The long railway strike of 1947-48 seen from the line itself. The workshops of Thiès stop, and from there the walkout runs west to the capital and port at Dakar and east along the track to Bamako. When the men are starved back toward defeat, the women take up the fight and march the road from Thiès to Dakar. The map holds the western Senegal stretch of that strike.
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Going Down River Road
Meja Mwangi
Mwangi's gritty novel of post-independence Nairobi follows Ben, a cashiered ex-soldier drifting through casual labour, cheap drink and cheaper rooms in the raw underside of the booming city. The real Nairobi is its stage: the bars and flophouses of the notorious River Road, the high-rise construction site where Ben sweats to raise a tower he will never enter, the shanty rooms of the poor, and the gleaming modern centre going up on their backs.
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Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone
J. K. Rowling
The Muggle London that hides a wizarding one: a zoo, a pub on Charing Cross Road, a station with a platform that is not there.
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Heart of Darkness
Joseph Conrad
Conrad steamed up the Congo himself in 1890 and Marlow's journey retraces his own. The places are never named in the book, but they map onto a real route: from the Company's Outer Station at Matadi on the lower river, overland past the cataracts to the Central Station at Leopoldville (now Kinshasa), and on up the great bend to the Inner Station near Stanley Falls (now Kisangani). The bbox spans that whole run.
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History: A Novel
Elsa Morante
In wartime and postwar Rome, Ida Ramundo, a timid half-Jewish widowed schoolteacher, is raped by a young German soldier and bears a son, Useppe, and mother and child struggle to survive through bombing, deportation, hunger and the black market as 'History' grinds the powerless underfoot. Morante's great anti-war novel maps a real Rome: the poor quarter of San Lorenzo and its bombing, the Jewish Ghetto and its deportation, the refugee shelters, and the ravaged city where innocence cannot last.
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History (La Storia)
Elsa Morante
Morante's wartime and post-war Rome, from 1941 to 1947, seen from the poor quarters rather than the palaces. A half-Jewish schoolteacher and her small son move from the tenements of San Lorenzo through the rubble of the Allied bombing to a shelter on the city's rural edge, past the ghetto emptied in October 1943 and out to Testaccio. The map runs from the San Lorenzo district by the Verano cemetery, southwest to the old Jewish quarter and Testaccio, and northeast to the barracks of Pietralata.
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Houseboy
Ferdinand Oyono
Oyono's colonial station of Dangan is invented, but he built it from the southern Cameroon he knew: the forest country around Ebolowa and the administrative reach of Yaoundé under French rule. A houseboy's diary maps that world by its divisions, the Residence and the European quarter set apart from the African quarter, the Catholic mission, the prison, and the border with Spanish Guinea where the story ends.
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How Green Was My Valley
Richard Llewellyn
The narrator Huw Morgan remembers his childhood in a South Wales coal-mining valley, in a close chapel-going community that the growing slag heap and the souring of the pits slowly destroy. Llewellyn set his idealised valley in the Rhondda, around Gilfach Goch: the terraced village and the Morgan house, the colliery that pays and kills, the slag tip creeping down the mountain to bury the green, the chapel at the moral centre, and the mountain top that survives above it all.
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Huasipungo
Jorge Icaza
Icaza's Ecuador is the Andean sierra above and around Quito, where a landowner in debt turns his highland estate over to a foreign oil company and drives the Quechua families tied to it to build a road through mountain and swamp. The map runs from the capital out into the highland countryside toward the eastern cordillera, the range that falls away to the Amazon.
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I the Supreme
Augusto Roa Bastos
Roa Bastos's dense, experimental masterpiece is the monologue of El Supremo, Dr José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia, the dictator who ruled Paraguay in absolute isolation from 1814 to 1840, dictating and raving to his secretary as he dies. The setting is his sealed capital: the government palace from which he rules by decree, the closed city of Asunción cut off from the world, the prisons of his repression, and the old colonial centre around the cathedral where his omnipresent power is felt.
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In the Castle of My Skin
George Lamming
Lamming's semi-autobiographical novel follows the boy G. growing up in a Barbadian village on the edge of a plantation in the 1930s and 40s, as the old colonial order begins to crack under labour unrest and the first stirrings of independence. The island grounds it: the poor village of wooden houses, the landlord's Great House on the hill above it, the colonial village school, the town of Bridgetown where the riots come, and the sea that will finally carry the young away.
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In the Skin of a Lion
Michael Ondaatje
Ondaatje's luminous novel gives back the immigrant workers written out of the making of Toronto in the 1910s and 1920s, following Patrick Lewis among the men who built the city's bridges and waterworks. The real Toronto is its stage: the great Bloor Street Viaduct rising over the Don Valley, the immigrant tanning district, the perilous tunnel dug out under Lake Ontario, and the cathedral-like waterworks that R.C. Harris built to purify the city's water.
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Independent People
Halldór Laxness
A sheep farmer's war of attrition with the land itself, set on a haunted croft on the open moor. The farm is invented, so the map anchors it in the countryside Laxness knew as a boy, the Mosfellsdalur valley and the Mosfellsheiði heath east of Reykjavík, and runs out to the capital and the coastal market town that pull his family away from the moor.
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Invisible Man
Ralph Ellison
The narrator's Harlem: a stretch of Lenox Avenue and 125th Street where he speaks for the Brotherhood, sees an old couple evicted onto the pavement, and is finally swept into a night of fire and looting. The arc runs from a Southern college and a downtown paint works into the heart of Harlem and down to the forgotten cellar where a man who feels unseen retreats underground.
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Jagua Nana
Cyprian Ekwensi
Jagua Nana, an ageing but still magnetic Lagos courtesan nicknamed for her Jaguar-car glamour, moves through the nightclubs, markets and thug-politics of the booming city as she clings to youth and to her young lover Freddie. Ekwensi maps the real Lagos: the nightclubs of the island where Jagua reigns, the colonial Marina, the crowded slums and markets of old Lagos, and the political rallies where money and muscle decide everything.
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Jamilia
Chingiz Aitmatov
Aitmatov's Talas valley in wartime: a Kyrgyz collective-farm village set between mountain ranges, the men gone to the front, the harvest to be carted down the steppe road and across the river to the railway. The map runs west from the regional town of Talas through the valley Aitmatov grew up in, out toward the line at Dzhambul over the Kazakh border.
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Journey to the End of the Night
Louis-Ferdinand Céline
Céline's night belongs to the poor northern edge of Paris: the boulevards around Place de Clichy and the grey working-class banlieue just over the old city wall, where a disillusioned doctor treats patients who cannot pay. Bardamu wanders far first, through the trenches, a French African colony and Ford's Detroit, but the book keeps returning to this rim of the city and ends there. The map anchors that Paris and the suburb of Clichy behind it; the overseas detours are marked as excursions beyond the setting.
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Justine
Lawrence Durrell
The first book of the Alexandria Quartet, in which a schoolteacher looks back on his love for the restless, magnetic Justine, wife of the wealthy Copt Nessim, in the cosmopolitan Alexandria of the years before the Second World War. The city is the true protagonist, Durrell's 'capital of memory': the sweep of the Corniche, the Cecil Hotel on the seafront, the crowded cosmopolitan and Arab quarters, and Lake Mareotis south of the town where a duck shoot ends in death.
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Kim
Rudyard Kipling
It opens on the gun Zam-Zammah outside the Lahore Museum, both still there, then walks the Grand Trunk Road the length of northern India. The anchor city is Lahore, now in Pakistan; the road and the Great Game carry the book east to Benares and north into the Himalayan foothills, so the bounding box spans the whole run from the Punjab to the Ganges.
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Kokoro
Natsume Sōseki
A young student befriends an older man he calls Sensei, a recluse burdened by a guilt he will not name, until a final confession reveals how, years before, Sensei betrayed his friend K over the woman he loved, and how K's suicide has shadowed his life ever since. Set against the death of the Meiji Emperor, Sōseki maps a real Tokyo and its edges: the Kamakura beach where student and Sensei first meet, the university and the walks of the capital, the lodging house of the old betrayal, and the cemetery where Sensei tends K's grave.
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Kristin Lavransdatter
Sigrid Undset
In fourteenth-century Norway, Kristin, daughter of the landowner Lavrans in the Gudbrandsdal valley, defies her betrothal for a passionate, ruinous love, and lives out a long life of desire, guilt, motherhood and faith that ends amid the Black Death. Undset's Nobel-winning trilogy maps a real medieval Norway: the valley farm of Kristin's childhood, the cathedral city of Nidaros where she seeks absolution, the convent at Oslo, and her husband's estate in Trøndelag.
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Leaves of the Banyan Tree
Albert Wendt
Across three generations of the Tauilopepe family in the Samoan village of Sapepe, Wendt traces the corrosion of communal life by ambition and money, as the ruthless Tauilopepe rises by clearing the bush for cash crops, his son rebels, and the old order of chiefs and church gives way. The book is rooted in a real Samoa: the village and its meeting-ground, the mission church that reshaped island life, the plantations carved from the forest, and the colonial town of Apia to which the young are drawn and lost.
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Life and Fate
Vasily Grossman
Grossman's vast novel turns on the Battle of Stalingrad in 1942–43 and braids it with the two great terrors of the century, the Nazi camps and Stalin's own. The city on the Volga is the fixed centre: the ruined streets, the encircled strongpoint the novel calls House 6/1, and the height of Mamayev Kurgan fought over yard by yard. Beyond it the book reaches to the Berdichev ghetto, where the physicist Shtrum's mother writes her last letter, and to the Lubyanka in Moscow, so that the war and the two tyrannies are held in one frame.
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Love in a Fallen City
Eileen Chang
Chang's Hong Kong is a colonial stage set for a courtship: the terrace and lawns of the Repulse Bay Hotel, the beaches of the south side, the ferries and hotels between Central and Kowloon. A divorced Shanghai woman and a Shanghai-born playboy circle each other through it until the Japanese invasion of December 1941 brings the whole set crashing down and, in the ruins, makes their bargain real. The old Bai house in Shanghai frames the story at either end.
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Love in the Time of Cholera
Gabriel García Márquez
García Márquez never names the Caribbean port of the novel, but readers and scholars identify it as Cartagena de Indias, with touches of Barranquilla and the Magdalena River. The walled colonial city, its cathedral and its seafront arcades supply the streets where Florentino Ariza waits half a century for Fermina Daza.
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Mamita Yunai
Carlos Luis Fallas
The Atlantic banana zone of Costa Rica in the 1930s, worked by the United Fruit Company that the labourers called Mamita Yunai. The map runs from the Caribbean port of Limón inland along the banana railway to the flooded plantations of the Estrella valley, then south into the indigenous Talamanca highlands where the narrator serves as an electoral delegate.
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Maps
Nuruddin Farah
Farah's Somalia is a country arguing with its own map. An orphan boy is raised by a woman in the Ogaden, the Somali-speaking region held by Ethiopia, during the 1977 war for it; he is then sent south to the capital to grow up among relatives who debate blood, nation and belonging. The map stretches across the Horn, from the Shebelle valley around Kallafo to the ocean at Mogadishu, roughly eight hundred kilometres apart.
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Memoirs of Hadrian
Marguerite Yourcenar
An ageing emperor writes to his heir, taking the measure of a life spent building. The map holds the monuments Hadrian left standing in Rome: the Pantheon he rebuilt and the great drum of his own mausoleum by the Tiber. It reaches east to his villa at Tibur and, on his memory's longer excursions, to the Athens he adorned and the Nile where Antinous drowned.
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Men in the Sun
Ghassan Kanafani
Three Palestinian refugees of different generations, the old Abu Qais, the bitter young Assad and the boy Marwan, gather in Basra and pay a driver, Abul Khaizuran, to smuggle them into oil-rich Kuwait hidden in the empty water tank of his lorry. Kanafani's route is real and merciless: the smugglers' quarter of Basra, the desert road south, the border at Safwan, and Kuwait just beyond, where the men bake to death in the tank during a fatal delay at the checkpoint.
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Midaq Alley
Naguib Mahfouz
Almost the whole of Mahfouz's novel happens in one cul-de-sac of old Islamic Cairo, Zuqaq al-Midaq, a real alley off the Sanadiqiyya near al-Azhar. Its café, barber's shop, bakery and the flat of the beautiful, restless Hamida make a world unto itself, jolted by the Second World War and the money of the British camps. When Hamida is lured out of the alley into the modern city, the closed world of Midaq Alley cracks open.
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Midnight's Children
Salman Rushdie
Saleem Sinai's Bombay, from Independence in 1947 to the Emergency of the mid-1970s, seen mostly from the hillside villas of Methwold's Estate on the Warden Road rise. The map holds to the elite crescent of Malabar Hill, Breach Candy and Cumballa Hill, with the school in the Fort and the sea at Chowpatty; the family saga's far excursions to Kashmir, Delhi, Karachi and the Sundarbans sit outside this frame.
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Migrations
Miloš Crnjanski
Crnjanski's melancholy masterpiece follows the Serbs of the Habsburg military frontier in the 1740s, colonists and soldiers of an empire not their own, dreaming of migrating to Orthodox Russia. Its ground is the Serbian frontier of the Vojvodina and Srem along the Danube: the frontier villages and the officer Vuk Isakovič's home, the great river that marks the border and the road to war, and the prosperous town of his merchant brother, while the campaigns of a foreign war and the far-off dream of Russia pull the exiles endlessly on.
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Mine Boy
Peter Abrahams
Xuma comes from the north to work in the gold mines of Johannesburg and lodges in the crowded slum of Malay Camp, where he slowly wakes to the injustice of the colour bar that rules every hour of his life. Abrahams maps the real segregated city: the multiracial shebeen world of Malay Camp and Vrededorp, the deep gold mines and their white dumps south of town, the white city centre where black men are only ever labour, and the streets where the police raid and the new consciousness stirs.
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Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow
Peter Høeg
Smilla Jaspersen, a prickly half-Inuit Greenlander in Copenhagen with an expert's feeling for ice and snow, refuses to believe that the small Greenlandic boy from her building simply fell to his death, and her investigation uncovers a secret mining conspiracy that draws her onto a ship bound for a remote Greenland glacier. Høeg's thriller maps a real geography: the wintry Copenhagen of the harbour and the cryolite company, the voyage north across the Atlantic, and the ice of Greenland that is Smilla's true element.
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Mrs Dalloway
Virginia Woolf
A single Wednesday in mid-June 1923. The novel is ordered by the striking of clocks.
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My Name Is Red
Orhan Pamuk
Over nine snowbound days in the winter of 1591, a miniaturist is found murdered in Istanbul, and Black, newly returned to the city, must find the killer among the Sultan's painters while courting the widow Shekure. Pamuk maps the real Ottoman capital: the workshops and streets of the old city, the imperial palace of Topkapi where the Sultan's secret European-style book is being made, the coffeehouse where the miniaturists gather, and the snow-covered city above the Bosphorus, in a novel that is also a meditation on art, faith and the clash of East and West.
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My Uncle Napoleon
Iraj Pezeshkzad
A comic novel of an extended family penned into a walled garden of adjoining houses in mid-town Tehran during the WWII Allied occupation. A teenage narrator loves his cousin Layli while the paranoid patriarch, Dear Uncle Napoleon, reads British plots into every ordinary event. The wider city, its bazaar and squares and the foreign troops in its streets, frames the household's quarrels. The map runs from the old central quarters up through the mid-town garden district to the summer retreats of Shemiran.
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Nedjma
Kateb Yacine
In eastern Algeria under French colonial rule, four young men, Rachid, Lakhdar, Mourad and Mustapha, circle around the beautiful, unattainable Nedjma, a woman of mixed blood who comes to stand for Algeria itself. Kateb Yacine's fractured, founding novel of Algerian literature maps the real east: the port and worksites of Bône, the gorge-cut city of Constantine, the ancestral lands of the Keblout tribe, and the colonial labour and violence out of which a national consciousness is being born.
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Nervous Conditions
Tsitsi Dangarembga
The eastern highlands of colonial Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe. A Shona girl's world runs between the family homestead in the Manicaland communal lands, by the Nyamarira, and the town of Umtali twenty miles off, renamed Mutare after independence. Between them lie the trading store and bus route, the mission school her uncle runs, and, far to the west, a convent that promises escape. Rusape and Mutare, the two real towns that frame the region, sit about ninety kilometres apart.
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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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Norwegian Wood
Haruki Murakami
The late-1960s Tokyo a middle-aged narrator looks back on: a spartan men's dormitory near Waseda, the record shops and drinking alleys of Shinjuku, and long aimless walks with Naoko out from Yotsuya along the old outer moat toward Iidabashi. A quieter, grieving city under the student unrest of the decade.
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Obasan
Joy Kogawa
A schoolteacher, Naomi Nakane, pieces together the wartime uprooting of her Japanese-Canadian family: torn from their Vancouver home in 1942, interned in the interior British Columbia ghost town of Slocan, then forced onto the Alberta beet farms, while her mother, trapped in Japan, is lost to the Nagasaki bomb. Kogawa maps the real geography of the internment: the seized coastal home, the mountain camp, the prairie exile, and the silence her aunt Obasan keeps over it all.
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Odessa Stories
Isaac Babel
Babel's dazzling stories bring to life the Jewish underworld of Odessa in the years around the Revolution, above all the flamboyant gangster king Benya Krik. The real city is their stage: the Moldavanka, the poor Jewish quarter that is the gangsters' realm, the bustling port and its draymen, the taverns where the raids are planned, and the bourgeois centre along Deribasovskaya that the King's men so gorgeously rob.
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Omeros
Derek Walcott
Walcott's book-length epic recasts Homer among the fishermen of St Lucia: Achille and Hector, who quarrel over the beautiful Helen; the wounded Philoctete; and the blind Seven Seas, the island's Omeros. Across the real island, from the fishing village of Gros Islet and the sea the men work, to the capital at Castries and the volcanic Pitons, the poem weaves the Aegean and the Caribbean, slavery's Middle Passage and the everyday life of a small Antillean nation into one great song of the sea.
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On Heroes and Tombs
Ernesto Sábato
Sábato's Buenos Aires is a haunted southern city: a bench in Parque Lezama where a shy student meets a woman who cannot be saved, a crumbling family mansion in old Barracas, and the paranoid tunnels imagined beneath the streets in the Report on the Blind. The novel keeps the porteño south at its centre, then breaks north for the historical retreat of Lavalle's beaten army.
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On the Road
Jack Kerouac
The book that turned a continent into a route. A young writer and his restless friend cross and recross the United States by car, bus and thumb, from New York out to Denver, on to San Francisco and the Bay, down to New Orleans, and finally in a headlong plunge south to Mexico City. The map follows that coast-to-coast spine and the last leg over the border.
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One Day of Life
Manlio Argueta
The rural north of El Salvador on the eve of the civil war, seen across a single day from a peasant farming family in the hills of Chalatenango. The map runs from the dirt roads and cornfields of a poor hamlet out to the departmental town, and up into the highland country toward the Honduran border where the National Guard, the army and the first guerrillas collide.
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One Hundred Years of Solitude
Gabriel García Márquez
In the town of Macondo, founded in the Caribbean lowlands by José Arcadio Buendía, seven generations of the Buendía family live out a century of love, war, invention and solitude, from the wonder of the founding to the apocalyptic wind that erases the town. García Márquez's Macondo is drawn from his own Aracataca in coastal Colombia, and its history mirrors the region's: the wandering gypsies, the endless civil wars, the banana company and its massacre, and the long rains that close the book.
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Our Lady of the Assassins
Fernando Vallejo
An ageing, embittered grammarian returns to the Medellín of the early 1990s, at the height of the cartel wars, and takes up with teenage sicarios, hired killers from the hillside slums, in a bitter lament for a city drowning in violence. Vallejo maps the real Medellín: the old churches of the centre he wanders in nostalgia, the comunas climbing the hills that breed the young gunmen, the metro that is the city's fragile pride, and the shrine at Sabaneta where the sicarios pray for their bullets to strike.
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Our Man in Havana
Graham Greene
Greene's Havana is the tourist capital of Batista's Cuba, all cocktail bars, floodlit cabarets and the sea breaking over the Malecon, where a downtrodden vacuum-cleaner salesman is recruited as a British agent and invents his network out of thin air. The map anchors in Old Havana, runs out to the seafront and the Tropicana, and slips east to Santiago as the revolution gathers.
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Out of Africa
Karen Blixen
Blixen's memoir of the years she ran a coffee farm in colonial Kenya opens with the line that fixes the place forever: she had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills. The map holds that real country outside Nairobi, the farmhouse that is now a museum, the ridge of the Ngong Hills, the town and the settlers' club, and the coast at Mombasa where the journey began. It brings Kenya and the East African highlands into the atlas.
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Palace Walk
Naguib Mahfouz
In the Gamaliya quarter of old Cairo, the merchant al-Sayyid Ahmad Abd al-Jawad rules his household as a tyrant and lives his nights as a pleasure-seeker, while his cloistered wife Amina and their children chafe against his despotism and the world beyond the latticed windows. The first volume of Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy maps the real old city: the family house on Bayn al-Qasrayn, the merchant's shop, the mosque of al-Husayn, the night world of Ezbekiyya, and the streets where the 1919 revolution against the British breaks out.
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Paradise
Abdulrazak Gurnah
Gurnah's East Africa on the eve of the First World War: a boy pawned to settle his father's debt grows up in a merchant's household on the Swahili coast, then travels inland with a trading caravan across the dry plateau to the great lakes and the mountains, moving through Arab, African and Indian worlds as German colonial power tightens. The map runs from the coral-stone coast at Kilwa and Bagamoyo up the old caravan road to Tabora, on to Lake Tanganyika, and north to the snow of Kilimanjaro.
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Pedro Páramo
Juan Rulfo
Rulfo set his town of the dead at the foot of the volcano in Colima, and the map holds the real Comala it grew from: a white-walled plaza, a parish church, the dusty road that drops down from the north, and the fire-mountain on the skyline. Juan Preciado goes looking for the father he was promised and finds a place where only the dead still speak.
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Perfume: The Story of a Murderer
Patrick Süskind
A Paris built from smell before sight: the reeking fish stalls of the old Innocents charnel-ground, the tanneries steaming by the Seine, and a perfumer's shop crowded onto a bridge over the river. The map anchors in the medieval heart of the city, then follows its scent-obsessed foundling south across France to the perfume town of Grasse, marked here as a deliberate excursion beyond Paris.
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Prisión Verde
Ramón Amaya Amador
The banana zone of Honduras's Caribbean lowlands in the 1930s, where the fruit companies ran the Sula valley as a private domain. The map follows the campeños from the endless plantation rows and company camps around El Progreso, along the Ulúa river, out to the industrial city of San Pedro Sula and the export port of Tela.
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Rebecca
Daphne du Maurier
The Cornish coast near Fowey, where du Maurier set Manderley, the great house on the cliffs above the sea. She modelled it on Menabilly, the real estate she later leased and lived in, with its cove and ruined boathouse below at Polridmouth. The map runs from the house down to the drowning cove and along to the harbour town, with a distant opening at Monte Carlo.
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Red Poppies
Alai
Narrated by the supposedly idiot second son of a Tibetan chieftain, Alai's novel follows the last days of the feudal chieftain system in the Gyalrong borderlands of eastern Tibet in the 1930s and 40s, as opium poppies bring sudden wealth, guns and ruin, and the Chinese armies close in. The world of the book is that frontier: the chieftain's fortress-estate, the poppy fields that transform it, the market and border where Han traders and warlords come, and the mountains beyond which a whole way of life is about to end.
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Red Sorghum
Mo Yan
Mo Yan's Northeast Gaomi Township is a fictionalised version of his own home county on the Shandong plain: a country of red sorghum, distillery villages and the Black Water River, where in 1939 a ragtag band ambushes a Japanese convoy at a stone bridge. The map runs from the county town of Gaomi out across the fields to the north-east, where the real Dalan district, the distillery-town sets and the river all sit near the Jiaozhou border.
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Rickshaw Boy
Lao She
Xiangzi, a strong young man come to the city from the countryside, pulls a rickshaw through 1920s Beijing with one dream, to own his own rickshaw and be his own master, and the city and its cruelties grind that dream down step by step. Lao She maps the real Beijing of the rickshaw men: the hutong rental yards where they lodge, the city gates where soldiers seize Xiangzi, the Western Hills he flees to with the army's camels, and the scholarly households of Haidian where he briefly finds decency.
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Savushun
Simin Daneshvar
In Shiraz during the Allied occupation of Iran in the Second World War, Zari watches her idealistic landowner husband Yusof refuse to sell his grain to the foreign army while famine and intrigue close in around their family. The first novel by an Iranian woman, and one of the most beloved in Persian, Daneshvar's Savushun maps a real Fars: the city and the family house and garden, the estates and villages Yusof will not betray, the restless tribes, and the mourning that gives the book its name.
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Season of Migration to the North
Tayeb Salih
A small village on the great bend of the Nile in northern Sudan, in Salih's own home country near Karmakol and the town of Ad-Dabbah. The narrator comes back from years of study in England to the palms, the water-wheels and the river of his childhood, and finds a stranger, Mustafa Sa'eed, whose buried life in 1920s London shadows the whole book. The map runs along the Dongola reach of the Nile and south to Khartoum, with one deliberate excursion north to the England of the flashback.
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Segu
Maryse Condé
In the Bambara kingdom of Ségou on the Niger, at the turn of the nineteenth century, the noble family of Dousika Traoré is scattered and transformed as Islam, the Atlantic slave trade and European ambition converge on West Africa. Condé's sweeping historical epic is rooted in a real geography: the animist royal city on the great river, the Niger itself, the Muslim learning of the north at Timbuktu, and the slave coast to which one son is carried away.
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Silence
Shusaku Endo
The Nagasaki coast in the 1640s, during the shogunate's campaign to stamp out Christianity. Two Portuguese Jesuits land in secret and shelter with the hidden Christians of the Sotome fishing villages and the offshore Goto Islands, before capture carries them to the city, its magistrate and the fumie. The map runs from the Sotome shore north of the city, out to the Goto Islands, and into Nagasaki itself.
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Sleepwalking Land
Mia Couto
Central Mozambique in the years of the civil war. An old man and a boy shelter in a burnt-out bus on an abandoned road through the bush and read a dead man's notebooks, whose journey runs along the Indian Ocean coast around Beira and Sofala and back through the ruined interior. The country is real and the war is real; the exact road and camps are left unnamed.
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Smilla's Sense of Snow
Peter Høeg
A Copenhagen of black winter water and Greenlandic exile. A half-Inuit woman who reads snow the way others read print refuses to accept that a neighbour's child simply fell from a warehouse roof, and follows the cold trail from the flats of Christianshavn out through the harbour and the Freeport to a ship bound north. The map runs along the Inner Harbour waterfront and up the Østerbro shore.
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Snow Country
Yasunari Kawabata
Kawabata's snow country is a hot-spring town on the west side of Honshu, reached from Tokyo by a train that runs south to north through a long mountain tunnel and comes out into deep Niigata snow. The map draws on the real onsen town of Yuzawa: the station, the bathhouses and inns on the slope, the cedars of the shrine, and the border tunnel that opens the book.
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So Long a Letter
Mariama Bâ
Newly widowed, the Senegalese schoolteacher Ramatoulaye writes a long letter to her lifelong friend Aissatou, taking stock of her marriage, her husband's taking of a young second wife, and the choices open to educated women in post-independence Senegal. Mariama Bâ's landmark of African women's writing is set in the real Dakar: the widow's house through the confinement of mourning, the mosque and the rites, the schools where the two women trained as pioneers, and the wider world Aissatou escapes to.
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Son of Man
Augusto Roa Bastos
Roa Bastos maps the Paraguayan people across half a century, from the red-earth villages of the central heartland to the waterless scrub of the Chaco. Interlinked stories move between Itapé and its wood-carver, the railway workshops and sugar country around Sapukai, the capital Asunción, and the far western battlefields of the Chaco War against Bolivia. The map runs wide, from the Guairá hills east of the capital out across the river to the northern Chaco.
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Sons and Lovers
D. H. Lawrence
The Nottinghamshire coalfield that made Lawrence. He renamed his home village of Eastwood "Bestwood" and the pit "Minton", but placed them exactly on the ground he grew up on: the collieries where his father worked, the Chambers family's Haggs Farm that became Miriam's, and Nottingham itself, where Paul takes the train to work and to the art school. It brings the English mining Midlands into the atlas.
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Sunset Song
Lewis Grassic Gibbon
Chris Guthrie grows up on a hard-won farm in the Mearns, the farming country of north-east Scotland, torn between the land she loves and the learning that could take her from it, as the First World War comes to break the old crofting world for good. Grassic Gibbon set his parish of Kinraddie in the real Howe of the Mearns around Arbuthnott: the farm of Blawearie, the ancient standing stones above it, the parish kirk, and the market town of Stonehaven on the coast.
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Texaco
Patrick Chamoiseau
Marie-Sophie Laborieux tells an urban planner sent to raze her shantytown the whole 150-year history of her family and of Texaco, the improvised quarter she founded on company land above Fort-de-France, from slavery through emancipation to the modern city. Chamoiseau maps the real Martinique: the tin-and-timber quarter of Texaco clinging to the hillside, the city of Fort-de-France below, the plantations of the enslaved past, and old Saint-Pierre before Mont Pelée destroyed it in 1902.
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The Age of Innocence
Edith Wharton
Gilded Age Manhattan, where an address is a verdict. Wharton is exact about which streets are respectable and which are not: the shabby old opera house on Fourteenth Street, the chocolate-coloured brownstones, and the bold new houses creeping up towards the Park. Half of these buildings are gone.
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The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay
Michael Chabon
The golden-age comic-book New York of two young cousins who invent a superhero to fight a war America has not yet joined. The map runs from a publisher's office high in the Empire State Building out to the tenement streets of Brooklyn, the bohemian rooms of Greenwich Village and the fairgrounds of Flushing Meadows, with Josef's Prague and a wartime Antarctic base held as far frames.
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The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Mordecai Richler
The sharp, driven poor boy Duddy Kravitz claws his way up in 1940s Montreal, convinced by his grandfather that a man without land is nobody, and schemes to buy a Laurentian lake by any means. Richler maps his own city: the Jewish immigrant streets around Saint-Urbain and the Main, the downtown clubs where the gangster Duddy idolises holds court, and the Laurentian resort of Ste-Agathe and the hidden lake to the north on which the whole book turns.
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The Assault
Harry Mulisch
A single night on a Haarlem quay in the Hunger Winter of 1945 sets the whole book in motion: a collaborator shot in the dark, a family burned out and killed in reprisal, one boy left alive. The map holds Haarlem, where it happens, against the Amsterdam of the postwar decades, where the surviving child grows into a doctor and slowly learns what that night really was. The two cities sit about twenty kilometres apart across the North Holland flatland.
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The Beach
Alex Garland
A young backpacker's Thailand: the traveller ghetto of the Khao San Road, then the long haul south to the party islands of the Gulf, and finally a rumoured paradise hidden in a marine park. The map runs from central Bangkok down to Surat Thani and out across the archipelago of Ko Samui, Ko Pha Ngan and Ang Thong, where the secret beach is imagined.
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The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Ayi Kwei Armah
In the disillusioned Ghana of the last days of Nkrumah, an unnamed railway clerk, the Man, refuses to take the bribes that everyone around him treats as ordinary, and is despised by his own family for it. Armah keeps the harbour city deliberately unnamed, drawn from Sekondi-Takoradi: the railway control office where the Man works, the port and its coast, the filthy home block, and the room of his disillusioned friend the Teacher; the political rot has its seat far off in Accra.
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The Bell Jar
Sylvia Plath
Esther Greenwood spends a glittering, hollow month as a guest editor at a women's magazine in New York, staying at a women-only hotel and going through the motions of a life she cannot feel, before returning to her mother's house in the Boston suburbs and a breakdown. The New York half is closely mapped: the Amazon hotel is the real Barbizon, the magazine is Plath's own Mademoiselle, and the United Nations turns up on a date. The Massachusetts scenes of home and hospital run outside the setting.
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The Blue Sky
Galsan Tschinag
The high Mongolian Altai of Bayan-Ölgii province, near the provincial centre Ölgii, where a Tuvan herding family follows its flocks between summer and winter pastures. A boy grows up among the yurt, the grandmother, the dog and the animals as the old nomadic world starts to give way under the socialist state. The map runs west from Ölgii through the Tuvan district of Tsengel to the glaciated peaks of Tavan Bogd on the Russian and Chinese frontier.
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The Bone People
Keri Hulme
The West Coast of the South Island, Te Tai Poutini: a narrow strip of black-sand beaches, tidal lagoons and rainforest pinned between the Southern Alps and the Tasman Sea. Kerewin Holmes lives alone in a tower she built on the coast near the Okarito lagoon; the mute child Simon and the Maori man Joe come into her solitude. The map runs the wet, wild coast from Okarito north to the old gold port of Hokitika, with one journey east across the island to Christchurch. The novel is steeped in Maori language and Kai Tahu presence, and greenstone, pounamu, runs through it.
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The Bonfire of the Vanities
Tom Wolfe
Wolfe's panorama of 1980s New York runs on the distance between its worlds. Sherman McCoy, a Wall Street bond trader who thinks of himself as a Master of the Universe, lives in a Park Avenue duplex and takes a wrong turn off the expressway into the South Bronx, where his mistress hits a young Black man with his car. The fallout pulls in the Bronx County Courthouse, a Harlem preacher, and the tabloids, and the map is the city's fault lines laid end to end.
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The Book of Disquiet
Fernando Pessoa
The factless diary of Bernardo Soares, an assistant bookkeeper who fixes almost his entire life to a few blocks of the Lisbon Baixa. The map keeps to the grid he names again and again: Rua dos Douradores, where his office and rented room stand, the parallel Rua da Prata, the Rossio at the head of the lower town, and the Tagus riverfront where the pavement runs down to the water at Cais das Colunas.
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The Bridge on the Drina
Ivo Andrić
Andrić watches four centuries of a small Bosnian town pass across one Ottoman bridge. The Mehmed Paša Sokolović Bridge, thrown over the Drina in 1577, is the fixed point: the town gathers on its central terrace, the market grows from its foot, and empires rise and recede around it until the bridge itself is broken in the First World War. The map holds the bridge, the river, and the streets of Višegrad around them.
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The Catcher in the Rye
J. D. Salinger
Having got himself thrown out of yet another prep school, Holden Caulfield spends two lost days drifting around Manhattan before he has to face his parents. The city is precisely his: Grand Central where he sleeps on a bench, the frozen pond in Central Park where he keeps wondering where the ducks go, the unchanging dioramas at the Museum of Natural History, and the carousel where his sister Phoebe rides in the rain at the end.
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The Conservationist
Nadine Gordimer
Mehring, a wealthy white industrialist, buys a farm outside Johannesburg as a weekend retreat and a tax shelter, and clings to his ownership of the land even as an unclaimed Black corpse, found and carelessly buried in his veld, quietly asserts a deeper and older claim. Gordimer's Booker-winning novel is set on the real Highveld of the Transvaal: the farm and its river and reeds, the African workers' compound, and the encroaching city and location that press on Mehring's fragile idyll.
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The Dark Child
Camara Laye
Camara Laye's luminous memoir recalls a Malinke boyhood in the Upper Guinea town of Kouroussa, before the pull of French schooling carries him away. The world of the book is the town on the Niger: the family compound and his father's goldsmith forge with its guardian snake, the grandmother's rice-farming village of Tindican, and the sacred grove of the initiation rites; far off on the coast lies Conakry, the college, and the road to France.
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The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years
Chingiz Aitmatov
The Sarozek: a sun-scoured stretch of Kazakh steppe strung along the single-track railway that crosses Soviet Central Asia. A veteran signalman keeps a lonely junction here, and when an old friend dies he sets out with the burial party across the emptiness toward an ancient clan cemetery, only to find the ground swallowed by the fenced-off launch ranges of the space cosmodrome. Legend, railway and rocket share the same horizon.
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The Death of Artemio Cruz
Carlos Fuentes
A corrupt press baron lies dying in his Mexico City mansion, and his fevered memory ranges back across the making of modern Mexico: his birth on a Veracruz estate, the Revolution in which he fought and betrayed, the marriage into a Puebla landowning family that founded his fortune, and the empire of newspapers and deals he built in the capital. Fuentes maps a life onto a country, the deathbed in the city holding all the places that made Artemio Cruz.
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The Devil to Pay in the Backlands
João Guimarães Rosa
Rosa's sertão is the vast dry backland of northern Minas Gerais and western Bahia, threaded by the São Francisco river and lifted into the high open plains the locals call the gerais. The ex-jagunço Riobaldo talks his whole life out in a single unbroken monologue, and its geography is deliberately diffuse: real towns and rivers surface as landmarks in a wandering that loops across hundreds of kilometres. The map runs north from Rosa's own country near Cordisburgo up the river past São Romão and São Francisco to the highland ranges near the Bahia border.
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The Egyptian
Mika Waltari
The physician Sinuhe tells the story of his life across the turbulent reign of the heretic pharaoh Akhenaten in fourteenth-century-BC Egypt. Waltari anchors it in the real ancient geography of the Nile: Thebes with its great temple of Amun, the House of Death across the river where Sinuhe learns his craft, Akhenaten's new sun-city of Akhetaten raised in the desert, the old capital of Memphis, and the far cities of the east to which Sinuhe's wanderings carry him.
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The English Patient
Michael Ondaatje
The frame of the novel is a bombed-out villa in the Tuscan hills as the war in Italy ends: a nurse, a burned man, a thief and a sapper hold together in the ruins of a former nunnery above Florence. The map centres on Villa San Girolamo at Fiesole and the city below, and reaches out to the Egyptian and Libyan desert the patient remembers.
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The Feast of the Goat
Mario Vargas Llosa
The last day of the dictator Rafael Trujillo, who ruled the Dominican Republic for thirty-one years, and the assassination that ends him, braided with the return of Urania Cabral to the city thirty-five years later to face what the regime did to her. The capital, then renamed Ciudad Trujillo, is mapped precisely: the National Palace, the seafront Malecón where the assassins wait, the torture cells of La Cuarenta, and the Mahogany House at San Cristóbal outside town where the Goat took the girls chosen for him.
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The Financier
Theodore Dreiser
Philadelphia and the making of a financier. Dreiser builds Frank Cowperwood's rise and ruin out of the real ledgers of the city: the banks and brokerages of Third Street, the trading floor of the exchange, the municipal offices in Independence Hall he corrupts, and the great gray penitentiary on Fairmount where he is jailed. It brings Philadelphia into the atlas.
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The Forest of the Hanged
Liviu Rebreanu
Apostol Bologa, a Romanian officer in the Austro-Hungarian army of the First World War, sits on the court-martial that hangs a Czech deserter, and is then ordered to the Transylvanian front to fight against his fellow Romanians, until conscience and divided loyalty tear him apart. Rebreanu sets it between the far Galician front where the hangings begin and Bologa's Transylvanian homeland: his home village near Năsăud, the border front against Romania, and the forest where he too will hang.
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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh
Franz Werfel
Based on a true episode of the Armenian genocide, Werfel's epic follows the Armenians of seven villages who, rather than submit to deportation in 1915, fortify the mountain of Musa Dagh above the Mediterranean and hold out for forty days until French warships take them off. The real coast of the old Vilayet of Aleppo, now Hatay, grounds it: the villages at the mountain's foot, the fortified plateau of the Damlayik, the sea below from which rescue comes, and the plain toward Antioch where the Ottoman power gathers.
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The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles
Fowles's Lyme Regis is a small Dorset seaside town in 1867, where a gentleman's certainties come apart on a stone breakwater. The map holds the Cobb and the town, runs west into the tangled wilderness of the Undercliff, then follows the story inland to Exeter and up to London.
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The Garden of the Finzi-Continis
Giorgio Bassani
In Ferrara at the end of the 1930s, the narrator, a young Jewish man, is drawn into the walled world of the aristocratic Finzi-Contini family and their vast private garden, where he falls hopelessly in love with the elusive Micòl as the fascist race laws close a ring around them all. Bassani maps his own city: the great garden behind the walls off Corso Ercole I d'Este, the ramparts the young people cycle along, the synagogue on Via Mazzini, and the monumental Jewish cemetery where the book begins and the family's tomb waits.
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The General in His Labyrinth
Gabriel García Márquez
The last months of Simón Bolívar, in 1830, as the sick and disillusioned Liberator makes his final journey out of Bogotá and down the Magdalena River toward the sea and death, his dream of a united Spanish America in ruins. García Márquez follows the real route: the descent from Bogotá to the river port of Honda, the long boat journey down the great Magdalena, the colonial town of Mompox, and the hacienda at Santa Marta where he dies.
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The General of the Dead Army
Ismail Kadare
Kadare's Albania is a country of rain, mud and mountain silence, crossed twenty years after the war by an Italian general and a priest sent to recover their nation's dead. The map runs from the capital Tirana out through the northern highlands to old battlefields and a labourers' work camp, with the Adriatic coast and the port of Durrës always at the country's back.
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The Glass Palace
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's saga opens in 1885 as the British storm the royal palace at Mandalay and depose the last Burmese king, and follows the orphan Rajkumar, who rises from that day's chaos to a teak fortune, across three generations and three countries. Burma is the heart: the Glass Palace and the sack of Mandalay, and the teak port of Rangoon. Beyond it lie the Indian town of Ratnagiri, where the exiled king is held, and the rubber estates of Malaya where the family's later fortunes are made and broken.
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The God of Small Things
Arundhati Roy
Roy's Kerala is a green, waterlogged world of rubber and pepper, of a pickle factory and a river that turns from playground to grave. The map gathers around Ayemenem, a real village on the Meenachal near Kottayam, then reaches west to the backwaters and north to Cochin, where the family's day at the cinema sets the tragedy moving.
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The Golden Notebook
Doris Lessing
The London of a divorced writer and ex-Communist in the late 1950s: talk in a Bloomsbury flat, the Party's real offices off Covent Garden, and the espresso bars of Soho where the literary and political left argued out the aftermath of 1956. The long African chapters, Anna's Rhodesian past in the black notebook, sit outside this frame and are marked apart.
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The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck
Wang Lung, a poor farmer, rises through his devotion to the land, marrying the plain, steadfast slave O-lan, until famine drives the family south to a great city and back, and returning fortune lifts them into a wealth that draws the next generation away from the soil that made them. Buck kept her geography deliberately broad, but rooted it in the real farming country of eastern China she knew: the fields and the great landlord's house, and the southern city where the starving family scatters in the streets.
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The Good Soldier Švejk
Jaroslav Hašek
Hašek's great comic novel follows the imperturbable Josef Švejk, whose blank-faced obedience makes a mockery of the Austro-Hungarian army, from his arrest in a Prague pub through the bungled machinery of the First World War toward a front he never quite reaches. The route is real Bohemia: the tavern U Kalicha where it starts, the garrison at České Budějovice, the famous 'anabasis' on foot around the South Bohemian villages, and the training camp at Bruck an der Leitha before the troop trains east.
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The Grapes of Wrath
John Steinbeck
Steinbeck follows one Dust Bowl family the whole length of Route 66. Driven off their land near Sallisaw in eastern Oklahoma, the Joads load a truck and drive west through Oklahoma City, the panhandle and the desert, across the Colorado River at Needles, over the mountains and down into the California Central Valley, where the promised work turns out to be hunger and hostility. The map is that migration, a real highway from Oklahoma to a government camp near Bakersfield.
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The Great Gatsby
F. Scott Fitzgerald
The summer of 1922 on the North Shore of Long Island and in Manhattan. West Egg and East Egg are Fitzgerald's names for the real Great Neck (Kings Point) and Sands Point peninsulas, facing each other across Manhasset Bay. The valley of ashes is the Corona ash dumps in Queens, passed on the road and railway into the city under the eyes of Doctor T. J. Eckleburg. The Plaza is the Plaza.
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The Handmaid's Tale
Margaret Atwood
Atwood wrote the novel while at Harvard and set the Republic of Gilead in the real Cambridge she knew. The old university town keeps its shape, but its landmarks are put to a theocracy's uses: the campus becomes a walled compound, the library a secret-police headquarters, the brick wall along the avenue a gallows. The map runs from Harvard Square through the Yard to the banks of the Charles.
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The Heart of the Matter
Graham Greene
A West African coastal colony in the middle of the Second World War, lightly fictionalised but unmistakably wartime Freetown, where Greene himself served in intelligence. A deputy police commissioner moves between the harbour and its anchored convoys, the waterfront wharf and the police station, the hillside bungalows above the town and the Catholic church, until private failure and Catholic conscience close in. The map runs across the Freetown peninsula, with one excursion inland to the border district.
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The Hostage
Zayd Mutee Dammaj
Yemen in the 1940s, under the rule of the Imamate. A boy from a highland tribe is held as a hostage for his family's loyalty and made a page-servant in the governor's fortress. The map runs from the mountain city of Taiz below Jabal Sabir north across the highlands to the imamic capital at Sana'a, roughly 250 kilometres away.
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The Hound of the Baskervilles
Arthur Conan Doyle
When Sir Charles Baskerville dies of fright near a legend of a spectral hound, Sherlock Holmes sends Dr Watson to guard the heir on the lonely wastes of Dartmoor while he works unseen. Doyle's most famous case maps a real and forbidding landscape: the Baker Street opening, Baskerville Hall on the moor, the treacherous Grimpen Mire, and the fog-bound heath across which the great hound comes.
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The House of Mirth
Edith Wharton
Lily Bart falls through New York one address at a time. The novel opens in the crowd at Grand Central and follows her down: the bachelor flats of the Benedick, the Trenors' great estate up the Hudson, the marble mansions creeping up Fifth Avenue, and, at the end, a milliner's workroom, a West Side boarding-house, and a bench in Bryant Park. The plot is a map, read downwards.
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The House of the Spirits
Isabel Allende
Allende never names the country, but its geography and its history are Chile's: the big house on the corner in the capital, the Tres Marías estate out in the countryside, and, in the last chapters, a very real September. The coup, the palace under fire and the stadium turned into a prison are Santiago in 1973. The map runs from the capital's streets north to the Aconcagua valley that stands in for the family's land.
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The Issa Valley
Czesław Miłosz
Miłosz's lyrical novel of boyhood follows Thomas, growing up on his grandparents' manor in the Issa valley of Lithuania in the years after the First World War, a world of forests, folk belief, hunting and the tangled loyalties of Poles, Lithuanians and Jews. He drew the valley from his own childhood at Szetejnie on the Nevėžis: the manor and its estate, the slow river and its meadows, the deep forests full of the old pagan spirits, and the village church.
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The Jungle
Upton Sinclair
A Lithuanian immigrant and his family come to Chicago for work and are ground down by the meatpacking industry. The map runs across the South Side: the real Union Stock Yards and the packinghouse district called Packingtown, the immigrant slum of Back of the Yards beside it, the dump and fertilizer works on its edge, and the downtown Loop where the ruined hero drifts at the end. Sinclair reported from the yards in 1904 before writing the book.
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The Kingdom of This World
Alejo Carpentier
Carpentier's northern Haiti runs from the sugar plantations of the Plaine du Nord and the colonial port of Cap-Français, through the night of the slave uprising, to the mountaintop kingdom that the freed slave Henri Christophe built for himself. The map holds the plain, the city now called Cap-Haïtien, the palace of Sans-Souci at Milot and the fortress of the Citadelle above it, with a single excursion across the water to the Cuban exile of Santiago.
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The Land of Green Plums
Herta Müller
Müller's Romania is the Banat under Ceaușescu, where four young ethnic-German friends leave a German-speaking farming village for the city to study, and the Securitate follows them into lecture halls, the student hostel, the factories they are posted to and the interrogation rooms. The map runs from the village on the Timiș plain to Timișoara's centre and university, then reaches east to the capital and out of the country to exile.
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The Leopard
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Lampedusa maps the end of aristocratic Sicily onto the real island his own family ruled. As Garibaldi lands at Marsala in 1860 and the old order falls, Don Fabrizio, Prince of Salina, moves between his Palermo palace and the family's dusty inland estate of Donnafugata, drawn from the Tomasi towns of Palma di Montechiaro and Santa Margherita di Belice. The map is western Sicily, from the capital to the sun-struck interior.
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The Lost Steps
Alejo Carpentier
A disillusioned musicologist, fleeing his hollow modern life, travels to South America and up a great river into the jungle in search of primitive instruments, and finds a world outside time before losing the way back to it. Carpentier maps the real journey up the Orinoco: the Latin American capital of Caracas, the river port of Puerto Ayacucho, the great river climbing into the Guiana highlands, and the deep forest of the tepuis where a settlement seems to exist before history itself.
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The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
A young engineer goes up to Davos for a three-week visit to his cousin at a mountain sanatorium and stays seven years, the fever of the place and of one guest keeping him on the heights while the flatland forgets him. The map climbs from the cure-town of Davos-Platz in the valley up the funicular to the sanatorium shelf, and out onto the high slopes where a blizzard nearly ends him.
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The Makioka Sisters
Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
The slow decline of a genteel Osaka merchant family in the years before the Second World War, told through four sisters and the long, failing effort to find a husband for the shy third sister, Yukiko. The Kansai world is exact: the comfortable house at Ashiya between Osaka and Kobe, the fading main family house in old Osaka, the modern port city of Kobe, and the annual pilgrimage to see the cherry blossoms in Kyoto, the still point of the family's year.
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The Maltese Falcon
Dashiell Hammett
Hammett worked the case out on a real city grid. Sam Spade's office looks down Sutter Street; his partner is shot in Burritt Alley, a real dead-end off Bush Street that now carries a plaque; he eats chops at John's Grill on Ellis Street, which still keeps a Falcon room upstairs; and the black bird itself comes ashore off a burning ship at the waterfront. The pursuit of the jewelled statuette runs a tight circuit of downtown San Francisco.
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The Man Without Qualities
Robert Musil
Musil's Vienna is the capital of a monarchy he nicknames Kakania, in its last year before the war that will end it. A detached young man drifts through the salons and ministries of an empire busy planning a grand patriotic jubilee that history will never let it hold. The map runs from the Ringstrasse and the imperial Hofburg through the palais quarter of the inner city out to the baroque garden districts where he keeps a small house of his own.
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The Master and Margarita
Mikhail Bulgakov
The Devil comes to atheist Soviet Moscow and turns it inside out. The map runs through the real city Bulgakov wrote from: a bench by Patriarch's Ponds, the writers' club drawn from Herzen House on Tverskoy Boulevard, and the haunted flat modelled on his own rooms on Bolshaya Sadovaya. A second thread, Pontius Pilate's Jerusalem, runs outside the city as a story within the story.
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The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie
Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby narrates the fall of his family, the fabulously mixed da Gama-Zogoiby spice dynasty of Cochin, from the pepper warehouses and the old Jewish quarter of Mattancherry to the art and gangland of Bombay, and at last to an exile in Andalusia that rhymes with the fall of Moorish Granada. Rushdie roots the saga in a real south India: the spice trade of Cochin, the Paradesi synagogue, the harbour of Vasco da Gama's landfall, and the far cities to which the family's ruin carries the Moor.
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The Murderess
Alexandros Papadiamantis
On the poor Aegean island of Skiathos, an old healer and midwife, Hadoula, worn down by a life of hardship and by watching the burden that daughters are to poor families, comes to a terrible conclusion and begins to kill baby girls, then is hunted across the island to her death. Papadiamantis, a son of Skiathos, sets it all on his real island: the cramped town, the herb-strewn hills, the wells and ravines, the mountain chapels, and the sea between the rocks that finally claims her.
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The Name of the Rose
Umberto Eco
In 1327 the Franciscan friar William of Baskerville and his young novice Adso arrive at a rich Benedictine abbey in the mountains of northern Italy, where a series of deaths draws them into a labyrinthine library and a deadly secret about a forbidden book. Eco sets his medieval murder mystery at an unnamed monastery in the Ligurian Apennines: the scriptorium where the monks illuminate manuscripts, the great fortress-library of the Aedificium, the church and grounds, and the Inquisition that arrives to twist the search for truth.
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The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency
Alexander McCall Smith
A gentle Botswana of red earth and acacia thorn, where a kind, shrewd woman opens the country's only female-run detective agency in a small building below Kgale Hill on the edge of the capital. The map runs from that hill and the office through the city centre and the mall, out along the Tlokweng Road, and north to the cattle country and her home village of Mochudi.
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The Old Man and His Sons
Heðin Brú
The old fisherman Ketil, of the self-sufficient traditional generation, gets carried away at a whale auction and buys more meat than he can pay for, and the debt sends him and his wife back to the hard old ways to make it good, against the grain of a Faroe Islands sliding into a modern money economy. Heðin Brú roots it in the real islands: the turf-roofed village, the fjord and the whale drive on its shore, the fishing boats, and the mountain outfield of the old subsistence life.
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The Phantom of the Opera
Gaston Leroux
The Palais Garnier is real, and Leroux insisted his story was too. He maps the building in precise detail: the auditorium and its great chandelier, Box Five on the grand tier, the dancers' foyer, the roof beneath Apollo's lyre, and the cellars below. The lake is real as well, a cistern built to hold back the groundwater that Leroux turned into the Phantom's underground lake.
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The Pillar of Salt
Albert Memmi
Alexandre Mordekhai Benillouche, a poor Jewish boy from the old quarter of colonial Tunis, comes of age torn three ways between his Berber-Jewish origins, the Arab-Muslim city around him and the French education that promises escape and delivers exile. Memmi maps the real Tunis: the cramped Jewish hara, the Arab medina and its souks, the European lycée of the Ville Nouvelle, the synagogue, and the shadow of the Second World War, when the German occupation drives Tunisia's Jews into forced-labour camps.
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The Plague
Albert Camus
When plague breaks out in the Algerian port of Oran, the town is sealed off and its people must reckon, each in their own way, with an absurd and impersonal death. Camus keeps the city real and specific: Dr Rieux's surgery in the ordinary streets, the closed town gates that turn Oran into a prison, the harbour and the sea that are suddenly forbidden, the cathedral where Father Paneloux preaches, and the municipal stadium turned into an isolation camp.
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The Poisonwood Bible
Barbara Kingsolver
An American missionary family lands in the Belgian Congo in 1959 and settles by the Kwilu River in the Bandundu backcountry, near the real river town of Kikwit. Over the next years the story follows the country out of colonial rule and into the turmoil of independence, from the fictional village of Kilanga to Leopoldville, then downriver to Bulungu. The map holds the Kwilu heartland; the family's later drift into Angola and back to Georgia falls outside it.
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The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie
Muriel Spark
In 1930s Edinburgh, the charismatic and dangerous schoolteacher Jean Brodie grooms her chosen set of six girls in art, romance and her own admiration for Mussolini, until one of them betrays her. Spark's city is her own: the genteel girls' school of the south side, the walk Brodie leads through the poverty of the Old Town, the Links and Meadows where the set parades, and the village of Cramond on the Forth where the music master lives.
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The Quiet American
Graham Greene
Greene's Saigon is the French colonial capital in its last years, seen through the weary British correspondent Fowler and the earnest young American Pyle. The map holds the short, dense spine of the old centre: the terrace of the Continental, the shopfronts of the rue Catinat, the square by the opera house where a bomb goes off at mid-morning, and the Majestic on the river where the war and the city meet the water. It brings Vietnam and 1950s Saigon into the atlas.
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The Radetzky March
Joseph Roth
Roth's elegy for the Austro-Hungarian Empire follows three generations of the Trotta family, ennobled after the first Trotta saves the young Emperor's life at Solferino, down to the aimless grandson Carl Joseph, an officer posted to a dreary garrison on the empire's eastern edge as it drifts toward 1914. The heart of the book is that Galician frontier near the Russian border, drawn from Roth's own Brody: the border garrison, the shabby town of gambling and debt, and the front where the last Trotta dies, while Solferino and imperial Vienna stand at the empire's other poles.
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The Reader
Bernhard Schlink
Schlink never names the city, but its river, old bridge and hillside castle are unmistakably his own Heidelberg, on the Neckar in the Rhine-Neckar region. A fifteen-year-old and an older woman meet here; a generation later the story reaches out to a war-crimes court near Frankfurt and a former camp in the Alsace hills.
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The Remains of the Day
Kazuo Ishiguro
In the summer of 1956 an ageing butler borrows his new employer's Ford and drives west out of Oxfordshire across the English West Country, ostensibly to inspect the roads and secretly to call on a housekeeper he once worked beside. The map follows that six-day trip: a first night by Salisbury Cathedral, on through the Somerset and Devon country to the far coast, and back to a pier at Weymouth where the accounting of a wasted life finally arrives.
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The Return of Philip Latinowicz
Miroslav Krleža
After twenty-three years away, the painter Philip Latinowicz returns to the provincial Pannonian town of his childhood in Croatia to confront his illegitimate birth, his estranged mother and his own creative and spiritual crisis. Krleža draws the town and its region from provincial Croatia: the small Catholic town with its square and church, his mother's house and tobacco shop, the flat muddy Pannonian plain, and the decadent manor world into which the fatal Bobočka draws him.
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The Secret Agent
Joseph Conrad
Built around a real event: the 1894 attempt to bomb the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad walks his anarchists across a London he names honestly, from Verloc's shabby shop in Soho to the Embassy in Belgravia, and the Observatory is still standing. The bomb, the park, and Greenwich are exact; the street names around the shop and the Embassy are invented, which is what the labels are for.
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The Shadow Lines
Amitav Ghosh
Ghosh's narrator remembers a divided subcontinent from a house in south Calcutta, where the streets around Gole Park and the lake hold a family's ordinary life. Memory then jumps the borders the novel calls shadow lines, west to the Prices' London and east to a grandmother's Dhaka, where the 1964 riots turn distance into loss. The map is anchored here in Calcutta, with those two waypoints reaching beyond it.
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The Sorrow of War
Bảo Ninh
A North Vietnamese veteran, Kien, comes home to Hanoi after the war and tries to write it down, his memory looping between the ruined city of his youth and the jungle where his battalion was destroyed. Hanoi is the fixed present: the apartment where he writes through the night, the lakes and streets he shared with his first love Phương, and the railway station from which the troop trains went south. The war itself is set far off, in the Central Highlands the soldiers called the Jungle of Screaming Souls.
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The Sound and the Fury
William Faulkner
The fall of the Compsons, an old Mississippi family, told four times over across three days in 1928 and one in 1910. Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County is drawn from the real Lafayette County, and its town of Jefferson from Oxford, where he lived and is buried. The map grounds the invented county in that ground: the courthouse square, the Compson place, the pasture sold off to a golf course, the branch below it. Quentin's day belongs elsewhere, at Harvard and on the Charles River in Cambridge, Massachusetts, mapped as scenes outside the setting.
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The Sound of the Mountain
Yasunari Kawabata
Kamakura, the old seaside capital, where one sleepless night the aging Shingo Ogata hears a deep sound from the wooded hills behind his house and takes it for a summons. He commutes to a Tokyo office along the line north, so the map runs from the temple town to the gardens of the capital.
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The Sound of Waves
Yukio Mishima
Mishima's simple, luminous love story is set on Uta-jima, a small fishing island in Ise Bay drawn from the real island of Kamishima, where the young fisherman Shinji and the diver's daughter Hatsue fall in love against a tide of gossip. The whole island is the book: the fishing village and its harbour, the steep stone steps of the Yashiro shrine to the sea god, the lighthouse on the height, and the sea itself, worked by the boats and the diving women.
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The Spider's House
Paul Bowles
In the ancient Moroccan city of Fez in 1954, as the nationalist rising against French rule reaches the medina, an illiterate boy, Amar, and a disillusioned American writer, Stenham, are thrown together amid the violence. Bowles maps the real city precisely: the labyrinth of Fez el-Bali, the shrine of Moulay Idriss and the Qarawiyyin at its heart, the French Ville Nouvelle where the settlers live, the Palais Jamaï on the medina's edge, and the Merinid tombs on the hills above from which the whole city is seen.
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The Stone Angel
Margaret Laurence
Ninety-year-old Hagar Shipley, proud, unbending and afraid, looks back over her hard life on the Manitoba prairie as she flees her son's house rather than be put in a home. Laurence's Manawaka, drawn from the real prairie town of Neepawa, anchors the memory: the Currie store and the blind marble angel in the cemetery, the Shipley farm of her rough marriage, and the west-coast city where her old age plays out its last defiant days.
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The Storyteller
Mario Vargas Llosa
A writer, haunted by a photograph glimpsed in Florence, reconstructs the story of his university friend Saúl Zuratas, a marked, Jewish-Peruvian outsider who vanished into the rainforest to become a hablador, a wandering storyteller of the nomadic Machiguenga people. Vargas Llosa maps a real Amazon: the jungle of the Machiguenga along the Urubamba, the mission and oil frontier pressing in on them, and the endless walking by which a people holds itself together through its tales.
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The Stranger
Albert Camus
Camus's Algiers is a city of white terraces, harbour light and Sunday tedium, where an ordinary clerk drifts from a funeral toward a killing on the sand. The map runs west from the courthouse and prison of the old European quarter out past the beaches beyond the bay to the inland town where the novel opens.
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The Street of Crocodiles
Bruno Schulz
In the provincial Galician town of his childhood, the narrator conjures a dreamlike, autobiographical world around his eccentric father, a textile merchant whose shop and mind decay into ever more fantastical metamorphoses. Schulz roots his hallucinatory prose in the real Drohobycz: the cinnamon-scented family house, the father's cloth shop on the market square, the town's ancient heart, and the shabby, garish new commercial district he calls the Street of Crocodiles.
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The Tailor of Panama
John le Carré
Le Carré's Panama City in the last years before the 1999 canal handover: a cramped colonial old town under the glass banking towers, the canal cutting inland to the locks, the rich hills and the poor barrios all held together by rumour and money. An expatriate tailor, flattered and squeezed by a British intelligence man, invents a country's secrets from his shop. The map runs from Casco Viejo out along the waterway to Miraflores and the Bridge of the Americas.
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The Temple of the Golden Pavilion
Yukio Mishima
Mishima's novel reworks a real event: the burning of the Golden Pavilion, Kinkaku-ji, by a young acolyte monk in 1950. The stammering, ugly Mizoguchi comes from a poor coastal temple to serve at Rokuon-ji in Kyoto, and his worship of the pavilion's unbearable beauty curdles until he destroys it. The city is real throughout: the gilded pavilion above its pond, the temple grounds where he lodges, Otani University where he meets the crippled cynic Kashiwagi, and the wartime and postwar streets of Kyoto.
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The Third Man
Graham Greene
Greene's story of the black market in occupied, four-power Vienna, where the pulp novelist Holly Martins comes to visit his old friend Harry Lime and arrives in time for Lime's funeral, then slowly learns that his friend is neither dead nor innocent. The ruined city is exact: the Central Cemetery where Lime is buried and reburied, the doorway in the old town where he is glimpsed alive, the Great Wheel at the Prater where the two friends have it out, and the sewers where the chase ends.
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The Third Wedding
Costas Taktsis
In a torrent of gossip, grievance and love, two Athenian women, Nina and the indomitable Ekavi, tell the tangled story of their families across the middle of the twentieth century, through marriages, the German Occupation and the Civil War. The real city is their whole world: the middle-class neighbourhoods of Kypseli and Patissia where the households rise and fall, old Plaka beneath the Acropolis, and the central squares where the famine and the fighting come.
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The Time of the Doves
Mercè Rodoreda
Natàlia, a working-class woman known as Colometa, tells the story of her life in the Gràcia district of Barcelona, her marriage to the domineering Quimet and his obsession with doves, and the Spanish Civil War that shatters her small world. Rodoreda maps the real neighbourhood: the Plaça del Diamant where Natàlia meets Quimet at a dance, the Gràcia streets and the flat overrun by his doves, the district under the bombs and hunger of the war, and the square she returns to at the end.
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The Time of the Hero
Mario Vargas Llosa
Vargas Llosa's first novel maps a cruel adolescence onto real ground: the Leoncio Prado military academy on the fog-bound cliffs of La Perla in Callao, and the Lima the cadets slip out to on leave. The map runs from the barracks above the Pacific across the bay to middle-class Miraflores and bohemian Barranco, down to the Costa Verde, and back to the working-class streets of Callao the boys came from.
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The Tin Drum
Günter Grass
Grass's Danzig, the city he was born in and lost, is the whole stage of the novel: the Kashubian potato country to the west, the Langfuhr suburb where Oskar grows up beating his drum, the Old Town and its theatre, the Polish Post Office he helps defend as the war begins, and the harbour out at Neufahrwasser. The map runs from the fields inland to the Baltic mouth of the Dead Vistula, over what is now Poland.
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The Truce
Mario Benedetti
In the form of a diary, Benedetti follows Martín Santomé, a widowed Montevideo office clerk approaching retirement, through an unexpected late love for a young co-worker, Laura Avellaneda, a brief truce of happiness against the grey routine of his life. The real city is its quiet stage: the downtown office where he counts out his last months of work, the main avenue of 18 de Julio, the waterfront Rambla along the river, and the rented room where the truce is kept.
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The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Milan Kundera
Kundera's Prague is a city under occupation and the memory of it: Tomas and Tereza love, quarrel and photograph the streets while Soviet-led tanks roll into Wenceslas Square in August 1968. The map holds the old core on both banks of the Vltava, from the square and the Old Town across Charles Bridge to the wooded rise of Petřín and the open plain of Letná, before the story leaves for exile in Zurich and a last retreat into the Bohemian countryside.
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The Underdogs
Mariano Azuela
The classic novel of the Mexican Revolution follows the peasant Demetrio Macías, who takes to the sierra to fight the federal troops and rises to a general in the revolutionary armies, only to be swept up in the factional wars and the futility of the whirlwind. Azuela sets it in the real country of the fighting: the mountains and villages of the Jalisco–Zacatecas sierra, the great battle of Zacatecas, and the Juchipila canyon where Demetrio begins and ends.
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The Ventriloquist's Tale
Pauline Melville
A century of one Wapishana family plays out across the Rupununi, the vast grass plain of southern Guyana between the Kanuku Mountains and the Brazilian border. Ranches and a Jesuit mission sit among the savannah settlements around Lethem, while a modern thread carries a son of the family north to the coastal capital, Georgetown, some four hundred kilometres away.
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The White Guard
Mikhail Bulgakov
The winter of 1918–19 in Kyiv, as the German-backed Hetmanate collapses and Petliura's Ukrainian nationalists close on the City, seen through the Turbin family and their friends, officers of a cause already lost. Bulgakov maps his own Kyiv: the family house on the steep Andriyivskyy Descent, the gymnasium where the volunteers muster, the shops and panic of the centre, the Golden Gate and St Sophia, and the Dnieper down which the beaten forces retreat.
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The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle
Haruki Murakami
Murakami's Tokyo is the quiet western suburb of Setagaya: a house at the end of a blind alley, a dry well in an empty lot, a small shopping street where an unemployed man goes looking first for a cat and then for a wife who has walked out of his life. From this stillness the book opens onto the west-side plaza at Shinjuku and, in memory, onto a war in Manchuria far outside the city. The map holds the suburban core and reaches east to Shinjuku.
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The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis
José Saramago
In 1936 Ricardo Reis, one of Fernando Pessoa's poetic alter egos, returns from Brazil to Lisbon just after the poet's death, and drifts through the rainy city, visited by Pessoa's ghost, as fascism rises across Europe and Salazar's shadow deepens at home. Saramago maps a real Lisbon: the hotel where Reis lodges, the cemetery where he speaks with the dead Pessoa, the viewpoint over the Tagus, the river and its docks, and the watchful capital of the New State.
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The Year of the Hare
Arto Paasilinna
A burnt-out Helsinki journalist walks away from his life after his car clips a hare on a country road, and carries the animal north across the whole length of Finland. The map runs from the capital up through the lake country and the forests to Lapland, and on to the eastern border with the Soviet Union.
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The Yellow Rain
Julio Llamazares
Andrés, the last living inhabitant of Ainielle, a real village high in the Aragonese Pyrenees abandoned by everyone else, keeps a final vigil alone among the ruins with his memories and his dead. Llamazares maps the dying village exactly: Andrés's house, the empty homes of the departed, the silent mill and fields, the cemetery he tends, and the mountain path down to the next village that he can no longer bring himself to take, as the yellow rain of falling poplar leaves buries it all.
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Their Eyes Were Watching God
Zora Neale Hurston
Janie Crawford's search for love and a self of her own carries her across Florida through three marriages: from her grandmother's cabin and a loveless farm in the west, to the all-Black town of Eatonville where she is the mayor's silenced wife, to the Everglades 'muck' by Lake Okeechobee where she finds joy with Tea Cake, until the great 1928 hurricane. Hurston roots her landmark of Black American literature in real places she knew, above all the self-governing town of Eatonville and the migrant bean fields of the Glades.
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Things Fall Apart
Chinua Achebe
The Igbo country of the lower Niger, where forest villages of yam farmers and titled elders meet the missionaries and colonial officials who came upriver. Achebe built the invented clans of Umuofia and Mbanta from the towns around his native Ogidi, near the great river port of Onitsha.
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This Earth of Mankind
Pramoedya Ananta Toer
Colonial Surabaya at the turn of the twentieth century, the largest port of the Dutch East Indies and a city ruled by a strict ladder of race and law. A gifted Javanese student at the elite Dutch H.B.S. is pulled south to Wonokromo, into the household of a formidable concubine who runs a European farm, and finally into the colonial courts. The map runs from the old town on the Kalimas down through Wonokromo to the sugar country of East Java.
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Three Trapped Tigers
Guillermo Cabrera Infante
A pun-drunk, nocturnal portrait of Havana in 1958, the last months before the revolution, following a handful of night owls, a photographer, a writer, an actor, a bongo player, through the cabarets and bars until dawn. Cabrera Infante maps the real nightlife: the open-air Tropicana cabaret, the neon strip of La Rampa in Vedado, the seawall of the Malecón where the friends drive and talk, and the older boulevard of the Prado. Over it all towers the doomed, magnificent singer La Estrella.
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To the Lighthouse
Virginia Woolf
Woolf names the Isle of Skye, but the house, the bay and the lighthouse are drawn entirely from St Ives, Cornwall, where the Stephen family spent childhood summers. The map runs from Talland House, the Woolfs' real holiday home above the town, out across St Ives Bay to Godrevy Lighthouse, the light the children could see from the garden and the one the family in the novel longs to reach.
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Train to Pakistan
Khushwant Singh
In the summer of 1947, the small Punjab border village of Mano Majra, where Sikhs and Muslims have always lived as neighbours, is torn apart by Partition when a ghost train of massacred Sikhs arrives from the new Pakistan. Singh's spare, unsparing novel is rooted in the real geography of the frontier: the mixed village by its railway station, the bridge over the Sutlej, the river swollen with the monsoon and the dead, and the trains that carry a people to safety or to slaughter.
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Trainspotting
Irvine Welsh
Welsh's Edinburgh is the one the tourist city turns its back on: the tenements, schemes and pubs of Leith and Leith Walk in the late 1980s, where a group of young heroin users drift between deals, dole offices and squalid flats. The map runs down Leith Walk from the New Town to the docks, takes in the great curved council block on Cables Wynd and the derelict station that gives the book its name, and ends with a doomed trip south to London.
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Truth and Justice
Anton Hansen Tammsaare
Estonia's national epic opens as the farmer Andres settles at Vargamäe, a hard, swampy farm, and spends a lifetime draining the bog, wresting a living from the land, and feuding with his neighbour Pearu, before his son Indrek carries the family's search for truth to the city. Tammsaare drew Vargamäe from his own home in Järva County: the farm and its endless ditches, the bog it fights, and the parish church, while distant Tallinn is where the next generation goes to be schooled and changed.
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Twilight in Jakarta
Mochtar Lubis
Lubis's angry panorama of Jakarta in the mid-1950s cuts between the classes of the young republic's capital, from the garbage collectors of the kampungs to the corrupt politicians and businessmen growing rich on graft. The real city organises it: the crowded poor quarters around Senen, the leafy elite villas of Menteng, the smuggling docks of Tanjung Priok, the old commercial town of Kota, and the government centre at Merdeka Square where the rot begins.
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Ulysses
James Joyce
One day, 16 June 1904, mapped street by street. Joyce said he wanted Dublin so exactly rendered it could be rebuilt from the book, and people have been walking it every Bloomsday since. From the Martello tower at Sandycove in the south to the graves at Glasnevin in the north, every place here is real and still findable.
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Under the North Star
Väinö Linna
In the Häme village of Pentinkulma, the tenant farmer Jussi Koskela clears a bog into a croft, and over three generations the simmering injustice between landless crofters and their landlords swells into the catastrophe of the 1918 Finnish Civil War, which tears the community apart. Linna's national trilogy is rooted in the real countryside of southern Finland he came from: the reclaimed farmland, the parsonage and manor, the workers' hall, and the front and reprisals of the war that split the young nation.
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Vilnius Poker
Ričardas Gavelis
The Soviet-era Vilnius of a paranoid mind: the capital of occupied Lithuania in the 1970s, its baroque Old Town, its library and its river all watched and warped by an unseen 'Them'. The map holds to the historic centre, from the university library and Cathedral Square up the castle hill to Gediminas Avenue, then renamed for Lenin, and the bend of the Neris.
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Voss
Patrick White
In the 1840s the obsessive German explorer Voss sets out to cross the Australian continent, sustained by a strange, wordless spiritual bond with Laura Trevelyan, a young woman he leaves behind in Sydney. White's novel holds together two worlds: colonial Sydney, with the Bonner household and the harbour from which the expedition departs, and the vast unmapped interior, drawn from the real inland journeys of explorers like Leichhardt, where the party is broken and Voss meets his death.
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Waiting
Ha Jin
For eighteen years the army doctor Lin Kong shuttles between his home village, where his dutiful arranged wife Shuyu lives, and the city hospital where he loves the modern nurse Manna Wu, bound by a rule that will not let him divorce until the couple have lived apart for eighteen years. Ha Jin sets his quiet tragedy of thwarted love in a real Manchuria: the northern farm village, the county divorce court, and the army hospital city of the Chinese northeast.
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White Teeth
Zadie Smith
Smith's North West London is a working, multicultural map: the terraced streets of Willesden and Cricklewood where the Iqbal and Jones families make their tangled lives from 1975 to the millennium, the high roads and cafés where the men gather, the local school, and a final swerve to a genetics institute in the centre of town. The map runs from Willesden Green east across Cricklewood and Kilburn to the West End.
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Wide Sargasso Sea
Jean Rhys
Rhys writes the Caribbean back into Jane Eyre, giving the first wife her own island childhood. The anchor is Jamaica, where the creole heiress Antoinette grows up at the ruined Coulibri estate near Spanish Town after emancipation; the story then crosses to a honeymoon house on Dominica, Rhys's own birthplace, and ends far away in an English attic. It brings Jamaica, and the wider West Indies, into the atlas.
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Z
Vassilis Vassilikos
A thinly fictionalised account of the 1963 murder of the leftist deputy Grigoris Lambrakis in Thessaloniki by right-wing thugs with police collusion, and the dogged investigation that exposed the conspiracy. Vassilikos maps the real city: the hall where the Deputy speaks at a peace rally, the central street where a three-wheeled truck runs him down, the hospital where he dies, the courthouse where an honest magistrate unpicks the cover-up, and the waterfront under the shadow of the coming junta.
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Zorba the Greek
Nikos Kazantzakis
Kazantzakis sets the novel on the coast of Crete, his own island, where the young narrator and the labourer Alexis Zorba reopen a lignite gallery and build a brief life by the sea. The real venture behind it happened across the water in the Messenian Mani. The map keeps both: it anchors the explicit Crete of the book at Heraklion, the author's birthplace, and marks the Peloponnesian mine that actually inspired it.
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Zuleika Dobson
Max Beerbohm
Oxford in one fatal summer term. A conjuror of dazzling beauty arrives to stay with her grandfather, the head of a college Beerbohm invents but sets in a city he keeps exact, and every undergraduate falls hopelessly in love. The map runs from the colleges of the High to the Sheldonian and Broad Street, then down through Christ Church Meadow to the Isis, where the young men drown themselves during Eights Week. It brings Oxford into the atlas.
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