Mapped
2666
Roberto Bolaño
Bolaño's Santa Teresa is a thin fictional mask over Ciudad Juárez, the Mexican border city facing El Paso across the Rio Grande. The map runs from the international bridges and the old downtown out to the maquiladora factories and the desert lots on the city's edge, where over years the bodies of hundreds of murdered women were found. A European frame, followed here to Bremen, opens the book far from that violence.
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A Brief History of Seven Killings
Marlon James
Marlon James's many-voiced novel turns on the 1976 attempt on the life of the reggae singer Bob Marley, the Singer, two days before a peace concert, and the political gang warfare of Kingston that lies behind it. The real city is its ground: the Singer's house on Hope Road where the gunmen strike, the ghetto garrisons of West Kingston tied to the rival parties, and the concert in the park; the story later follows the dons and their trade north to New York.
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A General Theory of Oblivion
José Eduardo Agualusa
Luanda on the eve of independence and through the long civil war that follows. A frightened Portuguese woman bricks up her apartment in a grand central building and lives walled in for nearly thirty years, growing food on the terrace while the city churns below. The map holds the old downtown, the bayfront Marginal, the water of the bay and the musseques that ring the city.
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A Gentleman in Moscow
Amor Towles
One hotel, three decades. A count sentenced in 1922 to house arrest lives out the whole Soviet era inside the Metropol, just off Theatre Square. The map is a single block: the hotel and its rooms, with the Bolshoi, Theatre Square, and the Kremlin walls at Red Square a few steps beyond the revolving doors.
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A Golden Age
Tahmima Anam
Dhaka in 1971, then the capital of East Pakistan, as the Bangladesh Liberation War begins. A widow and her grown children are drawn into the fight from a family house in the planned district of Dhanmondi, past the university where the March crackdown starts, out along the refugee road to Calcutta and a guerrilla camp near the border.
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A Little Life
Hanya Yanagihara
Four college friends build their adult lives in New York across some thirty years, the story circling ever closer to Jude St Francis, a gifted litigator carrying a childhood of unspeakable harm. The map holds to Lower Manhattan: a first cramped apartment on Lispenard Street in TriBeCa, the SoHo loft on Greene Street that Jude and Willem come to share, the downtown courts and the square by NYU, with a weekend house upstate off to the north.
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A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz
Oz's memoir maps a bookish, threadbare childhood in late-Mandate Jerusalem: a cramped basement flat in Kerem Avraham, the reading rooms of the National Library and the university on Mount Scopus, and the night the streets filled to celebrate the United Nations vote for partition. The map runs from the poor prophet-named streets of the north out east to the campus on the ridge and down into the heart of downtown.
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A Thousand Splendid Suns
Khaled Hosseini
Thirty years of Afghan history seen through two women married to the same brutal man in Kabul. Mariam grows up outside Herat and is married off to the shoemaker Rasheed; years later the educated Laila, orphaned when a rocket destroys her family's house, becomes his second wife, and the two women's alliance carries the book. The city is real and specific: Rasheed's house in the Deh-Mazang district, the dry-riverbed market called Titanic City, and the Ghazi Stadium where the Taliban hold their executions.
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Atonement
Ian McEwan
A country house in the Surrey heat of 1935, where a girl's misreading of one scene wrecks three lives, then the war that follows it: a soldier's long walk to the beaches of Dunkirk, and the London wards where the two sisters nurse the wounded. The map anchors on southern England, from the Surrey estate to wartime Lambeth and Balham, and reaches across the Channel to the French coast of the retreat.
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Beijing Coma
Ma Jian
Ma Jian's Beijing is two cities held in one body: the Beijing of spring 1989, when students carried the democracy movement from the campuses of the north-west out to the occupied heart of the capital, and the demolition-and-construction Beijing of the following decade, glimpsed through a window by a man who was shot on Chang'an Avenue and left in a coma. The map runs from the universities of Haidian down the central axis to Tiananmen Square and west along the avenue where the army advanced.
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By the Sea
Abdulrazak Gurnah
An elderly man, Saleh Omar, arrives in England seeking asylum, carrying the silence of a lifetime and a feud that reaches back to Zanzibar, over a house, a debt and the son of the man he ruined. Gurnah roots the past in the real Stone Town of Zanzibar: the merchant's shop and the contested house, the harbour and its dhow trade on the Indian Ocean, and the revolution that swept it all away; the English seaside town where the two exiles finally meet lies far outside that lost world.
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Celestial Bodies
Jokha Alharthi
Through three sisters of the village of al-Awafi in the interior of Oman, Alharthi traces a country moving in a single lifetime from a slave-owning, date-farming past into oil modernity. The world of the book is the interior: the village and its date plantations and irrigation channels, the desert around it, and the merchant households; beyond it lie the capital Muscat, where the new Oman is made, and Zanzibar, from which the enslaved were once carried across the sea.
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Crazy Rich Asians
Kevin Kwan
An American-born Chinese economics professor flies to Singapore with her boyfriend and discovers that his family is impossibly wealthy. The map runs from the arrivals hall at Changi across the island: a hidden colonial estate near the Botanic Gardens, the hawker stalls of Newton, the shops of Orchard Road, the rooftop of Marina Bay Sands and the beaches of Sentosa.
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Cutting for Stone
Abraham Verghese
Verghese's Addis Ababa is a highland capital of eucalyptus, corrugated iron and mission medicine, seen from a hospital where twin brothers are born and grow up. The map holds the old town around Piazza, the cathedral and the emperor's palace, and follows the city through the fall of Haile Selassie and the rise of the Derg before the story leaves Ethiopia for exile abroad.
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De Niro's Game
Rawi Hage
Rawi Hage's Beirut is the Christian East of the 1980s civil war: the tight streets of Achrafieh, the militia checkpoints and rooftop gunners, the port and the coast road north to the casino, all pressed against the Green Line that split the city from downtown south to the National Museum. The map runs from that dividing line across East Beirut to the harbour, then follows Bassam's flight out of the country.
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Frankenstein in Baghdad
Ahmed Saadawi
Baghdad under the US occupation, roughly 2005, a city broken by car bombs and checkpoints. The story is anchored in the old, run-down Bataween district of the central Rusafa side, where a junk dealer stitches body parts left by explosions into a corpse that comes to life and sets out to avenge the dead. The map runs from the neighbourhood's alleys and coffee house out to Tahrir Square, the faded grandeur of al-Rasheed Street and the Tigris that splits the city.
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Girl at War
Sara Nović
The Croatia of the war for independence and of the peace that follows it. The map opens in Zagreb in 1991, a ten-year-old's city of air-raid sirens, shelters and a family flat, then runs south to the killing grounds near the Bosnian border and, a decade on, back to the Dalmatian coast where the narrator returns to face what happened.
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Half of a Yellow Sun
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Eastern Nigeria on either side of the Biafran war. The story begins in the university town of Nsukka, in the quiet of a campus household, then follows the short life of Biafra as its capital falls back from Enugu to Umuahia and the region shrinks under blockade and hunger. The map runs south through the Igbo heartland, with the far northern city of Kano at its edge as the place the killing began.
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Hamnet
Maggie O'Farrell
A retelling of the death of Shakespeare's son, told through his wife Agnes, the herbalist and healer at the centre of the family. The map stays in 1590s Warwickshire: the glover's house on Henley Street where the young family lives in a cramped apartment, the farm at Shottery where Agnes grew up among bees and woodland, the church by the Avon where the boy is buried, and the chapel and grammar school of the town. London, where the father disappears to work in the playhouses, runs alongside as a scene outside the setting.
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Homegoing
Yaa Gyasi
Two half-sisters born in the eighteenth-century Gold Coast never meet, and the novel follows their descendants down parallel lines for two hundred and fifty years. One line stays in the Fante and Asante country of what is now Ghana, anchored on Cape Coast and its slave castle; the other is shipped across the Atlantic into American slavery and, generations later, the Great Migration north. The map centres on the Cape Coast Castle, where the two lines split, and runs inland to the Asante capital at Kumasi.
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Human Acts
Han Kang
Gwangju in May 1980, when soldiers moved on citizens who had risen against the dictatorship, and the decades in which the survivors carried what they saw. The map holds to a few blocks of the old city centre, where the militia held the Provincial Hall and the dead were laid out nearby, then reaches north to the cemetery where the killed were buried. Written with restraint: these are real places and real losses, and the notes are ours, not the author's words.
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In Praise of Hatred
Khaled Khalifa
Khaled Khalifa's Aleppo is the walled old city of the late 1970s and 1980s: a grand family house behind heavy doors, the covered stone souqs, the Citadel above them, a girls' school and the university on the edge of town. A young woman's family is pulled apart as the Ba'athist state and the Muslim Brotherhood turn on each other, a conflict that ends in the 1982 destruction of Hama to the south. The map holds to the Old City and reaches out once, to Hama.
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In the Shadow of the Banyan
Vaddey Ratner
The novel opens in Phnom Penh, where a seven-year-old girl of the royal family lives in comfort until, on 17 April 1975, the Khmer Rouge take the city and drive its whole population into the countryside at gunpoint. From there the map runs northwest, along the roads and rivers of the exodus into the rice provinces of Pursat and Battambang, where the family is broken apart by forced labour, hunger and killing. Ratner deliberately leaves her villages unnamed, so the rural points here mark the real region the deportations emptied into, not addresses the book supplies.
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Kartography
Kamila Shamsie
Two Karachi childhood friends, Raheen and Karim, grow up in the privileged seaside world of Clifton, until Karim's obsession with mapping the divided, violent city and a buried secret from the 1971 war drive them apart. Shamsie maps the real Karachi: the affluent villas of Clifton, the beach at Sea View, the tense old-city districts around Saddar where the ethnic violence flares, and the wider fractured metropolis Karim tries to chart, its wound reaching back to the war that made Bangladesh.
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Life of Pi
Yann Martel
Pi Patel grows up in the French-colonial town of Pondicherry, on India's south-eastern coast, where his father keeps a zoo set among the alleys and beds of the old Botanical Garden. When the family decides to emigrate they sail from Madras, and the story is later told to a visitor in Canada. The map anchors the Indian childhood: the garden, the White Town quarter and the port of departure.
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Middlesex
Jeffrey Eugenides
Three generations of a Greek American family, told by Cal Stephanides, run from a burning city on the Aegean to the assembly lines and streets of Detroit. The map holds the east-side Greek quarter where the grandparents land, the boulevard where the city caught fire in 1967, and the quiet modernist house out in Grosse Pointe where the family finally lands.
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My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
Ferrante's neighbourhood, the rione, is drawn from the real Rione Luzzatti on the eastern edge of Naples: a poor 1930s housing estate hemmed by the railway, with its stradone, its parish church and the tunnel out to the ponds. From there the map runs west to the wealthier centre, the elegant streets around Via Chiaia and Piazza dei Martiri, and out across the bay to Ischia.
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Never Let Me Go
Kazuo Ishiguro
A quietly dystopian England where children raised at a secluded boarding school are clones bred to give up their organs. The map runs from the rural southern countryside that hides Hailsham, north-east through the remote farmland of the Cottages to the Norfolk seaside at Cromer, and out along the flat coastal fields Kathy drives as a carer.
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Our Lady of the Nile
Scholastique Mukasonga
An elite Catholic girls' lycee perched high in the mountains of southern Rwanda, close to a spring held to be a source of the Nile. Behind the convent order and the school routine, the Hutu quotas and Tutsi persecution of the wider country play out among the pupils, a rehearsal in miniature for the genocide still to come. The map runs from the forested highlands near the Nile source down to the town of Butare and out to the capital, Kigali.
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Pachinko
Min Jin Lee
The Osaka of a Korean family who cross the strait and never quite arrive: the Ikaino ghetto where they are packed into a lane of tin-roofed houses, and the Tsuruhashi market where the women build a life from a kimchi cart and, in time, a sweets stall. The book's Osaka is a working city of tenements and railway arches; its edges reach back to Busan and forward to Yokohama.
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Palpasa Café
Narayan Wagle
Wagle's Nepal is split between a capital of cafés, galleries and easel painting and a countryside torn by the Maoist People's War. A painter named Drishya moves through Thamel, the old Durbar Square and the hill above the valley, then travels west into the war zone where he meets Palpasa; the violence he witnesses there follows him back to Kathmandu. The map runs from the city out to the mid-western hills that were the heartland of the insurgency.
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Paranoia
Viktor Martinovich
A thinly veiled authoritarian Belarus, watched from every corner. A young writer's affair with the mistress of the state security minister plays out along the vast Stalinist spine of Independence Avenue, across Independence Square, in the shadow of the security headquarters, and by the slow curve of the Svislach. The map runs south to north through the centre of a real, surveilled Minsk.
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Please Look After Mom
Kyung-sook Shin
An elderly mother, So-nyo, lets go of her husband's hand in the crowd at Seoul Station and vanishes, and her grown children search the city for her while confronting how little they ever really knew her. Seoul is the anxious present: the station where she disappeared, the subway and streets papered with her photograph, the children's apartments she was coming to visit. Behind it lies the rural hometown in the far south where she spent her whole hidden life.
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Purge
Sofi Oksanen
A farmhouse in rural western Estonia, the woods around it, and the country town beyond, held across the decades from the deportations of the 1940s to the first free summer of 1992. From this Laanemaa yard the story pulls east to Tallinn and, in the trafficking chapters, out of the country altogether.
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Shantaram
Gregory David Roberts
The 1980s Bombay of an escaped Australian convict who remakes himself as 'Lin': a city of Colaba tourist cafes and Gateway crowds, of a sprawling seaside slum, the red-light lanes of Kamathipura and the underworld that runs beneath them. The map anchors in South Bombay around Colaba and reaches north to the prison on Arthur Road.
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Snow
Orhan Pamuk
The poet Ka comes back from years of exile in Germany to Kars, a poor, half-forgotten city in the far north-east of Turkey near the Armenian border, to report on an epidemic of suicides among devout young women, and is snowed in for three days during which a small theatrical coup convulses the town. The real Kars gives the book its bones: the snowbound streets, the theatre where the coup is broadcast live, the tea houses of the unemployed, and the ruined Armenian churches that speak of a vanished past.
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Soviet Milk
Nora Ikstena
Soviet-occupied Latvia across two decades: a gifted Riga doctor is banished to run a rural clinic, and her daughter grows up between the flat dairy country of the countryside and the grey capital, as the occupation grinds on toward the independence that arrives with the map's final years. The map runs from Riga's Old Town out east and south into the farmland where the mother is exiled.
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Suite Française
Irène Némirovsky
France in the summer of 1940 and the Occupation that follows. Part One drives the panicked exodus out of Paris and down the choked roads south through the Loire; Part Two settles into an occupied Burgundy village where villagers and billeted German soldiers share the same streets. The map runs from the capital to the wine country of Saône-et-Loire.
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The Book of Chameleons
José Eduardo Agualusa
In a crumbling house in Luanda, Félix Ventura makes his living selling invented pasts and distinguished genealogies to Angola's new bourgeoisie, watched over by the narrator, a gecko on the wall who was once a man. When a stranger buys a whole new identity, the fabricated past collides with the real, violent history of the civil war. Agualusa sets his sly, dreamlike novel in the real Luanda: the decaying villa, the city of the newly powerful, and the buried wartime crimes that surface through the lies.
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The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind
William Kamkwamba & Bryan Mealer
The maize country of central Malawi, where the Kasungu plateau rolls east from the district town toward the trading centre of Wimbe. Through the 2001-02 famine a teenager on his family's farm teaches himself from library books and builds a windmill out of scrap, turning wind into light and water. The map runs from the farm and the little school at Wimbe out to the district town, and finally south to the capital.
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao
Junot Díaz
The Dominican half of a story that runs between New Jersey and the island. Díaz sets the family's fortunes against the long shadow of the Trujillo dictatorship: the walled Zona Colonial, the seafront Malecón, a quiet capital neighbourhood, the cane fields inland where the family curse turns violent, and Baní to the west, where the line begins. The map anchors on Santo Domingo; Oscar's Paterson sits outside it, to the north.
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The Coroner's Lunch
Colin Cotterill
Cotterill's Vientiane belongs to the first year of the Lao People's Democratic Republic, a shabby, watchful riverside capital where the new order runs on rumour and shortage. Dr Siri Paiboun, drafted at seventy-two into the job of national coroner, works out of a broken-down morgue at Mahosot Hospital and carries his cases from the ministries and the Mekong quay to the That Luang stupa, and once far north to the Hmong highlands of the Plain of Jars.
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The Dark Side of Love
Rafik Schami
Schami's vast Damascene saga braids a forbidden love across a blood feud between two clans with a murder mystery and a century of Syrian history. Old Damascus is its heart: the Christian quarter of Bab Touma where the clans live, the ancient Straight Street running through the walled city, the Umayyad Mosque at its centre, and the shadow of the secret police; the feud reaches back to the mountain village of Mala from which both families came.
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The Devils' Dance
Hamid Ismailov
Two Uzbekistans held in one mind. In 1938 the writer Abdulla Qodiriy is taken to the NKVD prison in Tashkent during Stalin's terror, and in his cell he builds, sentence by sentence, an unwritten novel about the last khans of Kokand and the poet-queen Nodira. The map runs from the old city of Tashkent down some two hundred and thirty kilometres to the Ferghana Valley, where the nineteenth-century strand plays out in Kokand, Margilan and Ferghana.
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The Eighth Life
Nino Haratischwili
A six-generation family saga anchored in Tbilisi, where a chocolate-maker's secret recipe carries a curse down the century. The map holds the old town below Narikala, the grand houses of Sololaki at the foot of Mtatsminda, and the parade of Rustaveli Avenue through the Soviet years. The story ranges far, to Petrograd, Moscow, London and Berlin, but its heart stays in the Georgian capital.
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The Elegance of the Hedgehog
Muriel Barbery
Almost the whole novel is held inside one grand bourgeois apartment building on the Left Bank, at 7 rue de Grenelle. A concierge who hides her learning, a wealthy set of tenants, and a girl planning her own disappearance share its lodge, stairwell and flats, with a café and the surrounding streets of the 7th arrondissement just beyond the door.
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The Garden of Evening Mists
Tan Twan Eng
The Cameron Highlands are Malaysia's cool tea country, a hill station of mist, jungle and terraced estates high in Pahang. A survivor of a wartime Japanese camp comes here to build a garden for her dead sister and instead apprentices to a Japanese gardener, while the Malayan Emergency simmers in the surrounding forest. The map runs from the town of Tanah Rata out across the tea slopes to the mossy summit forest, with the frame narrator's Kuala Lumpur far below.
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The Gift of Rain
Tan Twan Eng
On the island of Penang, the half-English, half-Chinese Philip Hutton is taken as a pupil by the Japanese diplomat Endo-san, who teaches him aiki-jutsu and a hard code of duty, only for the bond to be tested to breaking when Japan invades Malaya in 1941. Tan maps his home island: the Hutton family's George Town mansion and the colonial society of the port, the small island off the coast where Endo-san lives and teaches, the town under brutal occupation, and Penang Hill above it all.
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The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Stieg Larsson
Larsson's Stockholm is a city of investigative journalism and cold money, centred on Södermalm: the Millennium magazine on Götgatan, a reporter's attic on Bellmansgatan, a hacker's flat above Mosebacke. From there the story makes one long excursion north, to the invented island of Hedeby in the river country beyond Gävle, and back again to settle scores in the capital's finance world.
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The Goldfinch
Donna Tartt
The novel is anchored in Manhattan, where a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum kills the narrator's mother and leaves him holding a small stolen Dutch painting. From the museum on Fifth Avenue the map runs down to the Park Avenue apartment that takes him in and to the antiques workshop in Greenwich Village that becomes his real home, before the story travels far out to Las Vegas and then to Amsterdam.
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The Help
Kathryn Stockett
Jackson, Mississippi in the early 1960s, told in the voices of two Black maids, Aibileen and Minny, and Skeeter, a young white woman who secretly collects their accounts of working in white households. The city is real and its divisions are geographic: the white families in the leafy streets of Belhaven, the maids' own neighbourhood over by Farish Street, the segregated downtown, and the Phelan cotton farm out past the edge of town.
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The Hungry Tide
Amitav Ghosh
In the Sundarbans, the vast tide country of mangrove islands where the Ganges meets the sea, an American cetologist, Piya, a Delhi translator, Kanai, and an illiterate fisherman, Fokir, are drawn together among the shifting channels, the tigers and the river dolphins. Ghosh maps the real delta: the railhead at Canning, the island settlement of Lusibari and its trust, the tidal creeks where the dolphins gather, and Morichjhanpi, where refugees were massacred in 1979.
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The Kite Runner
Khaled Hosseini
The Kabul of a boy's memory before the wars: the walled gardens and quiet embassy streets of the affluent Wazir Akbar Khan district, a hill where kites fight over the rooftops each winter, and the lake west of the city where families picnic. The same places return years later scarred by Soviet occupation, civil war and Taliban rule, when a stadium becomes a killing ground.
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The Line of Beauty
Alan Hollinghurst
Moneyed London under Thatcher, seen by a young aesthete who lodges with a Tory MP's family. The map runs from the tall white houses and locked communal garden of a Notting Hill square out to the clubland of Westminster, the villas of Holland Park, and the night paths of Hampstead Heath.
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The Lowland
Jhumpa Lahiri
Two inseparable brothers grow up in the Tollygunge neighbourhood of Calcutta, until the younger, Udayan, is drawn into the Naxalite revolution and killed in the lowland behind their home, and the elder, Subhash, marries his widow and takes her to America. Lahiri roots it in real Calcutta: the Tollygunge family house, the low flooded ground and its two ponds where Udayan dies, and the walled Tolly Club that borders their world; across the ocean lies the Rhode Island life Subhash builds on that grief.
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The Luminaries
Eleanor Catton
A gold-rush mystery set in Hokitika on the wild West Coast of New Zealand's South Island in 1866, where a newcomer, Walter Moody, stumbles into a secret council of twelve men trying to make sense of a fortune, a dead hermit, a vanished young prospector and a prostitute found half-dead. The boomtown is real and exact: the hotels and shipping offices of Revell Street, the deadly bar at the mouth of the Hokitika River, the gold claims out toward the Arahura, and the gaol above the town.
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The Ministry of Utmost Happiness
Arundhati Roy
Roy's sprawling novel gathers India's outcasts around Anjum, a hijra who leaves her communal household to make a home, and a guesthouse, in an Old Delhi graveyard, while the war in Kashmir sends its wounded into the story. Delhi is the heart: the House of Dreams in the old city, the graveyard where Anjum builds her Jannat Guest House, the protest ground of Jantar Mantar, and the great Jama Masjid; the Kashmir Valley runs alongside as the wound outside the setting.
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The Museum of Innocence
Orhan Pamuk
One man's love turned into an inventory of a city. The map runs from the wealthy boutiques and flats of Nişantaşı, where Kemal is engaged and the affair begins, down the hill through Beyoğlu to the old timber houses of Çukurcuma, where the years of longing settle and where Pamuk later built a real museum to hold them.
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The Old Drift
Namwali Serpell
A century of Zambia in one saga, following three intertwined families. It begins at the Old Drift, the colonial river settlement by the Victoria Falls on the Zambezi, moves through the flooding of the Kariba Dam, and settles into modern Lusaka, its compounds and its university, before pressing on into a near future. The map runs some 470 kilometres north-east from the falls to the capital.
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The Purple Violet of Oshaantu
Neshani Andreas
The world of the novel is Owamboland, the flat communal farmland of far northern Namibia, where homesteads sit among the mahangu fields and the year turns on the rains. The narrator watches her friend's marriage and widowhood in the village of Oshaantu, while the regional towns near Oshakati draw the men away to wage work. The map runs from the fictional village out across the real Owambo lands to Oshakati and Ongwediva.
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The Reluctant Fundamentalist
Mohsin Hamid
A single evening in Lahore frames the whole book: a Pakistani man buttonholes an uneasy American at a cafe in the Old Anarkali bazaar and talks him through his life over tea and a long dinner, the two of them drifting out toward the Mall as the light goes. His memories carry the story abroad, to Princeton, Manhattan, Manila and Valparaiso, but the ground under the telling stays fixed in Lahore. The map holds the old bazaar quarter and the colonial spine of the Mall, with the outside chapters pinned where they belong.
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The Secret River
Kate Grenville
A Thames waterman, transported for theft, lands in the raw penal colony at Sydney Cove and then takes up land sixty kilometres north on the Hawkesbury River. The map runs from The Rocks up to Wisemans Ferry and the reaches of the lower Hawkesbury, called Dyarubbin by the Darug people whose country the settlers were seizing. The frontier violence in the book is drawn from the documented history of these reaches.
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The Shadow of the Wind
Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Zafón's Barcelona of the postwar 1940s: a fog-bound old town of narrow lanes and antiquarian bookshops, from a hidden library in the Raval and a family shop off La Rambla out to the ruined modernista mansions above the city and the cemetery on Montjuïc.
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The Stolen Bicycle
Wu Ming-Yi
A writer's hunt for his vanished father's lost bicycle becomes a walk back through twentieth-century Taiwan. The map centres on old central Taipei: Zhonghua Road and the vast Zhonghua Shopping Bazaar the family lived and tailored suits in, and the Wanhua-Bangka district of temples, antique stalls and bicycle shops. The search reaches back to the Japanese colonial years and, far to the south-west, to the forests of the Burma campaign of the Second World War.
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The Vegetarian
Han Kang
Han Kang's Seoul is a modern city of apartment towers and family duty, where a woman's decision to stop eating meat quietly pulls a marriage and a family apart. The map runs from the couple's flat and the parents' apartment across the two sisters' homes and a video artist's studio, then out to a psychiatric hospital in the wooded mountains on the city's northern edge.
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The White Tiger
Aravind Adiga
Adiga splits India in two: the Darkness of the rural Ganges plain, where a servant is born and stays a servant, and the Light of the boomtowns, where money and violence remake a man. The map follows a driver out of a poor Bihar village, past the coal roads of Dhanbad, into the malls and gated colonies of Delhi and Gurgaon, and on to Bangalore, where he becomes his own master.
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The Yacoubian Building
Alaa Al Aswany
Not the medieval alleys of Islamic Cairo but the European-built downtown of the 1930s, Wust el-Balad: Art Deco blocks, cafes and bars around Talaat Harb and Kasr El Nil, a whole society stacked inside one apartment house from the ground-floor offices to the iron huts on the roof. The map keeps to a few downtown streets, all real, all within a short walk of Talaat Harb Square.
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Three Apples Fell from the Sky
Narine Abgaryan
A remote mountain village called Maran, clinging to a high ridge in the Armenian highlands, where a few dozen elderly villagers outlive famine, earthquake and war and a late love still finds room to grow. Maran is invented, but it is drawn from the author's own home town of Berd in the Tavush region of north-eastern Armenia, so the map anchors the story in the real Tavush highlands rather than a fictional coordinate.
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Time Shelter
Georgi Gospodinov
Gospodinov's Sofia is the Bulgarian heart of a novel about a Europe seduced by its own past. A clinic that rebuilds vanished decades room by room spreads from Switzerland until whole countries vote on which era to move back into. The map holds to the mausoleum-haunted centre of the capital, from the yellow-paved political square out along Vitosha Boulevard.
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We, the Drowned
Carsten Jensen
A century of seafarers from the little Danish town of Marstal on the island of Ærø, from the 1848 war to 1945, whose men sail the world's oceans and drown in them by the boatload while their women wait at home. Jensen roots the epic in the real port town, its harbour and shipyards, and follows its sailors, Laurids Madsen who went to heaven and came back, his son Albert, the boy Knud Erik, out to the far ports of the South Seas and into the U-boat wars of the Atlantic, and back to the widows of Marstal.
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Wolf Hall
Hilary Mantel
Tudor London seen from the desk of a blacksmith's son who rises to run a kingdom. The map holds the City around Cromwell's own house at Austin Friars, then reaches west to Cardinal Wolsey's York Place as it becomes the King's Whitehall, downriver to the Tower, and upriver past Putney to the palace at Hampton Court.
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