Wikidata, the free database behind Wikipedia, records the real places where 7,300 novels are set, and 5,918 other plays, stories, poems and books besides. I put them all on one map. Fiction turns out to love three cities, to travel less than you might think, and to leave most of the world almost unwritten. The map also shows where a few volunteers have been very busy.
Every novel happens somewhere. Some of those somewheres are invented, but most are real: Dickens's London, Balzac's Paris, Chandler's Los Angeles. Wikidata records them with a property called narrative location, and because each place carries coordinates, the settings of literature can be put on a map. I downloaded every literary work in Wikidata with at least one real narrative location: 13,218 works, 7,300 of them novels, set in 4,057 distinct places across 154 countries.
The map below lets you search for a book or an author, filter by genre and period, and draw a line from where an author was born to where their story takes place. Then scroll on for what the map says about fiction, and about the people who catalogue it. Wikidata is written by volunteers, and in a few places a single dedicated project has added more settings than the rest of the world combined. That is part of the story too.
Filled circles: cities, towns and single sites, with area proportional to the number of works set there. Zoomed out, places within 25 km of a big city are merged into that city; zoom in to see streets, buildings and neighbourhoods. Rings: wider areas (states, islands, regions) drawn at their Wikidata point. Settings that name only a whole country or a continent are not drawn as points; click a country to see them. Click a circle for its works, search for a book or author to see its places, and turn on birthplace lines to draw the journey from the author's birthplace. Source: Wikidata (CC0), extract made with QLever in 2026. Outlines: Natural Earth. Relief: Esri World Hillshade.
Three cities stand far above the rest. 549 novels are set at least partly in London, 510 in New York and 422 in Paris. Together they appear in 20% of all the novels on the map. Count every literary work, including plays, short stories and poems, and Paris comes first, with 877, ahead of New York's 813 and London's 786: French plays and stories are particularly well recorded. After them come Los Angeles (140 novels), San Francisco (136), Rome (126) and Madrid (104).
The cities with the most novels set in them
Novels set at least partly in each city area (places within 25 km of a big city count for it, so Baker Street and Brooklyn count for London and New York). Outlines: all literary works. Click a bar to see the city on the map.
Single authors shape the list. Benito Pérez Galdós, who chronicled nineteenth century Spain, accounts for 37 of Madrid's novels; Rex Stout's detective Nero Wolfe for 43 of New York's; Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret for 38 of Paris's. And one name in the top ten needs explaining. Pittsburgh is eighth, with 98 novels, ahead of Chicago (65) and Boston (60). Pittsburgh is not the literary capital of America, but the novels set there are unusually well catalogued in Wikidata. Mumbai, a city of about 19 million people, has 4; Lagos 3; Tokyo 24.
The three cities have taken turns. In novels published between 1830 and 1849, the age of Balzac, Hugo and Eugène Sue, Paris is the setting of 44% of the novels with a mapped place, against 11% for London. By the turn of the twentieth century London had caught up, and it led between the wars. After 1950 New York took over: 15% of novels published from 1950 to 1969 are set there, more than in London (10%) or Paris (12%). Since 1990 London has edged back in front, while Paris has faded to about 5%.
London, Paris and New York, by publication period
Share of novels with a mapped place (a city, site or area) that are set at least partly in each city, by twenty years of first publication. The early periods are small samples (counts under the axis). Hover a point.
All three shares fall in the most recent decades because the map has grown wider, not because the cities have lost their appeal: novels published since 1990 are spread across many more places. Wikidata holds far more recent novels than old ones; half of the novels with a date were first published in 1991 or later.
For 6,654 novels Wikidata knows both where at least one author was born and the country of at least one setting. 69% of them are set entirely in the country where their author was born (judged by today's borders), and 31% go abroad at least once. The distances are short. Measuring from the author's birthplace to each mapped place, the median is 343 km, and 25% of settings lie within 50 km of where the author was born. Writers really do write about home.
How far from home
Distance from the author's birthplace to each mapped setting of a novel (6,147 novel and place pairs; for co-written books the nearest author). Hover a bar.
Some travel much further. The longest journey on the map belongs to Ngaio Marsh, born in New Zealand, who set 8 of her 10 mapped detective novels in Britain: Death at the Bar, set in Devon, lies 19,174 km from her birthplace in Christchurch, almost the far side of the planet. P. L. Travers, born in Australia, set all 7 of her Mary Poppins books in London. Among the 398 authors with at least three mapped novels, those two travel furthest.
Who goes abroad, by the author's country of birth
Share of novels set at least partly outside the present-day country where the author was born. Countries with at least 40 such novels. Hover a bar for where they go.
Birthplace is not nationality, and the chart shows it. Writers born in what is now Ukraine top the list (94% abroad) because Joseph Roth, Irène Némirovsky, Mikhail Bulgakov and the Italian crime writer Giorgio Scerbanenco were all born there and set their books in Austria, France, Russia and Italy. Belgium's 89% is mostly Simenon, born in Liège, whose Maigret lives in Paris. Nigeria's 60% owes much to Simon Scarrow, born in Lagos, whose 32 Roman army novels are mostly recorded as set in Italy. At the other end, 22% of novels by American-born writers go abroad, and 28% of those by British-born writers.
Wikidata gives a genre for many novels. Crime and mystery is the biggest group with real settings, 869 novels, and its capital is Paris (95, many of them Maigret's), then London (82) and New York (59). Relative to all novels, crime is unusually drawn to Miami, Oslo, Edinburgh and Venice, home of Donna Leon's Commissario Brunetti. Science fiction that uses real places goes to New York and London, but it is 3.5 times as likely as the average novel to be set in San Francisco. Fantasy with a real setting belongs above all to London (47). Historical novels lean towards Europe: Paris (38), London (35) and Rome (9). And 25 works in Wikidata are set at least partly on the Moon, and 3 on Mars; they are counted here but not mapped.
The favourite cities of each genre
Novels in each genre group set at least partly in each city area. A novel can belong to more than one group. Click a panel to filter the map by that genre.
Novels on the map are concentrated in two continents. 54% of novels with a setting in a known country are set at least partly in Europe, which is home to 10% of the world's people; 32% in North America, home to 8%. Asia, with 60% of humanity, has 9% of the novels, and Africa, with 17%, has 5%. Per person, Europe has 37 times as many mapped novels as Asia, and North America 14 times as many as Africa.
Where novels are set, against where people live
Share of novels with a setting in each continent (a novel can count for more than one) and share of the world's population (Natural Earth estimates). Hover a bar.
The gaps are largest in the most populous countries. China has 111 mapped novels for 1.4 billion people, India 158, Pakistan 13 and Bangladesh 2. The United Kingdom, with 67 million, has 1,216. This is not a measure of how much fiction is written in those places. It reflects what has been catalogued in Wikidata, with English labels, by its mostly European and North American volunteers, and what gets translated and written about in English. 7 countries of more than 10 million people have no mapped novel at all.
Look closely at the map and Denmark glows. It holds 476 distinct setting places, 12% of every place in the data, more than any other country, including the United States (410). Denmark has 0.08% of the world's people; China and India together, with more than a third, have 110 places between them. Danish works are recorded in extraordinary detail: the 222 works in Danish have an average of 3.0 settings each, against 1.1 for works in English, down to individual Copenhagen streets. One Danish novel, Koordinater, lists 53 places. 95% of Denmark's places come from works in Danish.
Distinct setting places by country
All literary works. Red: the two countries where single cataloguing projects stand out. Hover a bar.
Serbia is the second case. Its 137 places put it eighth in the world, mostly from 112 works in Serbian, 96% of them published before 1930, with an average of 5.5 settings each. Both are the work of careful volunteers adding the settings of their national literatures, and both are good things. They are also a warning: a map like this measures the attention of the people who build the database as much as it measures literature. The same is true of Pittsburgh's place among the great fiction cities, and of the thinness of Asia and Africa. I have left the data as it is, and the novel counts used in the rest of this page are much less affected than the place counts: Denmark has 57 mapped novels and Serbia 54.
Wikidata counts how many language editions of Wikipedia have an article about each book, a rough measure of fame. The best-known novel on the map is Don Quixote, with articles in 147 languages; it is set in Spain. Next come Nineteen Eighty-Four (138), set in England, and Dream of the Red Chamber (117), set in China. Choosing the best-known novel set at least partly in each country gives some surprises: wandering books win in many places, so Robinson Crusoe is the best-known novel set in Venezuela, and Paulo Coelho's The Alchemist in Egypt.
The best-known novel set in each country
By Wikipedia language editions (sitelinks). 154 countries. Click a row to see the book on the map.
The southernmost setting is the South Pole itself, reached in fiction by Jules Verne in 1869 and again in 1897. The remotest inhabited places in fiction are the islands of French Polynesia, more than 5,016 km from any city of a million people, which owe their place largely to old travellers' tales and to Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London. Wikidata also holds 15 invented places that it gives real coordinates: Lovecraft's Arkham in Massachusetts and R'lyeh in the South Pacific, Starfleet Academy in San Francisco, and 221B Baker Street. They are on the map, marked as fictional, but left out of every count of real places above.
Data. One Wikidata query, run with QLever in 2026, returned every item that is an instance of a kind of literary work and has a narrative location with coordinates: 19,443 rows covering 13,241 works. Further queries gave each work's classes, genres, country of origin, language, form, sitelinks and English Wikipedia article, and each place's classes and country. 13,218 works have at least one setting on Earth; 23 more are set only on the Moon or Mars. A work counts as a novel if Wikidata gives its form as novel or novella, or if it belongs to a class with "novel" in its name (graphic novel, unfinished novel, light novel series): 7,300 works. I made two exceptions: the 67 tales of the Decameron, which Wikidata files as novellas in the Decameron, and the Odyssey, whose form Wikidata gives as novel. Both stay in the literary works.
Places. I sorted each place by its Wikidata classes into cities and towns (1,720), single sites and parts of cities (1,098), wider areas (839), countries (342) and continents, oceans and world regions (58). Only the first three are drawn as points. 1,994 novels name only a country or larger area. City areas join every city or site within 25 km of a Natural Earth city of 250,000 or more people. A place's country is the present-day country its point falls in. The distance from home uses the coordinates of the author's place of birth, and "home" means the present-day country of that birthplace, which is not always the author's nationality.
What this is not. This is a map of what Wikidata records, not of all literature. Coverage depends on volunteers, on English labels and on what has an article in Wikipedia; 2,301 works have no English label. Settings are often partial: a novel set in several places may list one of them, and some settings are recorded only as "New York" the state when the city is meant. Genres are as Wikidata gives them, grouped by me. Publication years are the earliest date recorded.