Veniamin Kaverin's The Two Captains is set in Pskov (the book's "Ensk"), Moscow, Leningrad and the Arctic, following Sanya, a mute boy who grows into an Arctic pilot and sets out to prove what happened to a lost polar expedition.
The route follows the book from a flooded yard in Pskov to the orphanages of Moscow, the Leningrad blockade, the archipelago of Severnaya Zemlya and Polyarny's Square of Two Captains. Moscow, Leningrad and Severnaya Zemlya are city- or region-level pins, since the book names no exact addresses there.
Beatrix Potter's tales are set in the real Lake District: Mr McGregor's garden at Lingholm near Derwentwater, Owl Island on St Herbert's Island, Mrs Tiggy-Winkle's home on Catbells, and the village and farm of Near Sawrey, including Hill Top.
The route follows five places from Peter Rabbit in 1901 to the Hill Top tales of 1907 and 1908, moving from the shores of Derwentwater to the house Potter bought in 1905. Some pins mark an area, not a single spot.
The Shire is partly Birmingham: Tolkien said Sarehole Mill and its pond inspired the Mill at Hobbiton, and the wooded Moseley Bog beside it fed the ancient forests of his books. Both lie in the suburbs of Birmingham, England.
The route follows Tolkien from his childhood at Sarehole and Moseley Bog, past Perrott's Folly in Edgbaston, to North Oxford, where he wrote The Hobbit, and the Eagle and Child pub, where the Inklings met. Some links are Tolkien's own words; the Folly is only a suggestion.
Astrid Lindgren's Pippi, Emil and the children of Bullerbyn trace back to Näs and Sevedstorp near Vimmerby, to the Gibberyd farm that played Katthult, and to Mariannelund, where Emil heads for the doctor.
The route runs from the author's birthplace through the village that served as the model for Bullerbyn to the film farm and the theme park. Katthult and Bullerbyn are story places; the pins mark their real stand-ins.
Anne of Green Gables is set on Prince Edward Island: Avonlea is based on Cavendish, Green Gables is an 1830s farmhouse there, and at sixteen Anne goes to Queen's Academy in Charlottetown. Lucy Maud Montgomery's 1908 novel, much loved in Japan as Red-haired Anne, sends a talkative orphan to a farm by mistake.
The route follows the book's real island: the village behind fictional Bolingbroke, the lake Anne renames, Green Gables itself, the woods she fears, her Charlottetown college and the window where it was written. Avonlea and the Cuthberts are invented; the pins mark the real places that inspired them.
Hemingway wrote A Moveable Feast about his poor, happy early years in 1920s Paris, working from notebooks he had left in trunks at the Ritz in 1928. It was published in 1964, after his death.
This route walks the memoir's Paris: the flat on the rue du Cardinal-Lemoine, Gertrude Stein's salon, Sylvia Beach's bookshop, the cafés of Montparnasse and Saint-Germain, and the Ritz where the notebooks resurfaced. Hemingway himself said the book may be read as imagination, so treat its scenes as a memory, not a record.
Huck Finn fakes his own murder and, with Jim, who has run away from slavery, takes a raft down the Mississippi. Their goal is Cairo, where Jim would be a free man the minute he saw it. They miss it in the fog and drift on into slave country, past a feud, two con men and a farm with the book's last twist.
Twain built St. Petersburg from his boyhood town of Hannibal. Most places in the novel are invented, so each pin marks a real landmark or stand-in, and the Grangerfords' country and Bricksville stay off the map.
Barcelona, 1945. A bookseller leads his ten-year-old son Daniel through a dark alley off the Ramblas to the Cemetery of Forgotten Books, a secret library where every child may adopt one book. Daniel chooses a novel by Julián Carax — and discovers that someone has spent years hunting down and burning every other copy.
Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2001 bestseller is a love letter to the old city, and its mystery runs through real streets: the Ramblas, the Gothic Quarter, the Ribera, Tibidabo and Montjuïc. The library, the bookshop, the hospice and the Aldaya mansion are invented, so those pins mark the streets where Zafón put them; the café, squares and castle are real and open to visitors.
