The Italian Job (1969) is set in Turin, with the Great St Bernard Pass, Kilmainham Gaol in Dublin and the Nivolet Pass among its real filming places.
The story is a gold heist in traffic-jammed Turin. This route follows it from the Alps through London and Dublin to the Museo Egizio, Lingotto and the final bus on a mountain road. Some scenes were filmed far from where the story puts them.
Oath brothers, a hermit strategist, a bridge held by one man and a battle on the Yangtze: the classic novel turns the fall of the Han dynasty into a saga of loyalty and cunning. This route follows Liu Bei from a peach garden to his deathbed.
The novel is fiction built on the Records of the Three Kingdoms. Each stop says what the novel tells, what the record says, and which places are linked to the story only by later tradition, such as the Zhuozhou temple and the disputed Red Cliffs.
Exit West sends Saeed and Nadia through magic doors from a city at war to a tent camp on Mykonos, an empty mansion in Kensington, London, and Marin County, north of San Francisco. Mohsin Hamid's 2017 novel skips the refugees' dangerous journeys and keeps only the arrivals.
The doors are magic, but Hamid calls the book "geographically autobiographical": every stop is a place he has lived in or loved. The home city is never named, though he says it was based in many ways on Lahore, so that pin is speculative.