The Geography of Story: Cities as Characters
Storycraft Mini-Series - How place shapes narrative, identity, and voice.
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I’ve long been fascinated by place as character within story. When I write novels, place is at the heart of the storytelling. I also love literary travel writing - stories that journey, that immerse, that connect us.
Have you ever noticed how some cities jump to life on the page, take on main character energy to drive a story?
Don DeLillo’s New York in Underworld for example - a book in which the city pulses with Cold War tension, baseball mythology (the American Dream), urban noise and conflict - hyper modern, energetic, urgent, sprawling - it’s one of the most expansive portraits of New York ever put into a novel. Feeling the city’s energy as I read that novel - and then visiting NYC later only to find the same frenetic frequencies mirrored back.
In the same way Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love made me fall in love with Cairo as political crossroads and emotional landscape. In the novel’s dual‑narrative structure, Cairo becomes a meeting point of East and West, language becomes contested ground, something to always be translated, mapped. The novel uses Cairo (and Egypt at large) to anchor personal and political memory. The protagonists’ identities - their heritage, political commitments, romantic and family ties - are inseparable from the land.
Some cities enter literature the way a person enters a room - with a presence that shifts the air. And in the hands of great writers, cities don’t simply frame a story: they shape it, move it, argue with it, and sometimes save or destroy the people who walk their streets.
Writers have always known that a city has its own psychology.
Charles Dickens gave London a personality that changes with the hour. In Bleak House, it coughs and chokes in its own fog, grumbling like an irritable old man. In Great Expectations, the same city becomes sly, shadowed, watchful - a place that conspires in Pip’s ambitions and humiliations. Dickens didn’t describe London; he invented its temperament.
Teju Cole’s New York in Open City is restless, improvisational, always shifting registers - a place that pulls identities into its current and throws them back transformed.
A city’s mood is a story engine.
Some cities have tempers so strong they practically argue with the narrator.
James Joyce’s Dublin is stubborn, slyly comic, provincial and cosmic all at once - a city that refuses to let its people leave or forget where they came from. In Ulysses, its temper almost determines the novel’s structure: wandering, associative, alive.
Elena Ferrante’s Naples has a volatile, explosive temperament. It is a city with teeth - biting, dazzling, full of threat and appetite. Lila and Lenù grow up wrestling not only with their own desires but with Naples’ temperament itself: its noise, logic, heat, and dangerous charisma.
Cities can be antagonists. Or accomplices.
Hanya Yanagihara’s New York in A Little Life is seductive, inexhaustible, and indifferent, a city whose glittering ambition presses on the characters until they crack.
Meanwhile, in Naguib Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, Cairo is a commanding patriarch — steeped in tradition but bristling with modernity, its authority shaping the trajectory of an entire family.
Temper is conflict. And conflict is story.
Zadie Smith’s NW London is a patchwork of particularities - Caribbean sound systems, Willesden accents, North London ironies - a city that speaks in twenty idioms before breakfast. Its oddities aren’t decoration but character logic.
Haruki Murakami’s Tokyo is surreal because he documents the city’s inherent strangeness: jazz bars at midnight, quiet elevators that seem to think, alleys that resist straight lines, cats with opinions. Murakami observes Tokyo like an introvert watching a brilliant, unpredictable friend.
And then there’s Orhan Pamuk’s Istanbul — a city defined by melancholy, the Turkish hüzün - a collective sorrow so specific it becomes a philosophy. His Istanbul is contemplative, moody, fog-softened, and always looking over its shoulder at its former imperial grandeur.
The particular is what lets us recognise a city, the same way we’d recognise a friend by their laugh.
Cities become characters when writers:
Assign them emotional states
Fog, heat, noise, silence - these are not descriptions but feelings.
(Dickens’ fog = legal corruption. Ferrante’s heat = social pressure.)
Let the city change the plot
Characters miss trains, overhear arguments, get lost in alleys, cross bridges that alter their lives.
The city is the plot’s co-author.
Give the city a voice
Through dialect, signage, overheard conversations, street music, food smells - the city speaks.
Let the city contradict itself
A good city-character is inconsistent: generous in the morning, cruel by dusk.
Show the city’s impact on identity
Writers often show characters becoming more themselves - or less - because of where they are.
Cities shape made-up lives the way real ones shape ours.
Seeing cities as characters helps us write:
with sharper atmosphere
with more psychological depth
with texture that pulls readers inside the world
with a sense of “story inevitability,” where place and plot feel inseparable
Most importantly, it lets us remember that story doesn’t happen in a vacuum.
It happens in somewhere - and that somewhere is alive.
Cities change us. And when we write them well, they change our characters too.
Reading List: Cities as Characters
To see how city functions as character in literature, here are some of my favourite novels and cities as character pairings:
London
Charles Dickens — Bleak House - London as fog, corruption, mood, and moral labyrinth
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Zadie Smith — NW - London as polyphonic, funny, fractured, alive.
Dublin
James Joyce — Dubliners - The city rendered through paralysis, yearning, and luminous detail.
Sally Rooney — Conversations with Friends - Dublin as cool, intimate, and emotionally charged: a modern counterpoint to Joyce.
New York
Colson Whitehead — The Colossus of New York - Essays that read like the city thinking out loud.
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Hanya Yanagihara — A Little Life - New York as both possibility and pressure.
Tokyo
Haruki Murakami — After Dark - Nocturnal Tokyo as dreamlike, uncanny, unexpectedly tender.
Yoko Tawada — The Emissary - A near-future Tokyo whose strangeness is political, bodily, and surreal.
Istanbul
Orhan Pamuk — Istanbul: Memories and the City - The definitive portrait: melancholy, memory, and the philosophy of place.
Elif Shafak — The Bastard of Istanbul - Istanbul as contradiction: vibrant, wounded, comic, and defiant.
Lagos
Teju Cole — Every Day Is for the Thief - Lagos as improvisation, density, movement, risk.
Chris Abani — Graceland - A raw, pulsating city shaping (and distorting) identity.
Cairo
Naguib Mahfouz — Palace Walk (and the full Cairo Trilogy) - Cairo as patriarchal authority, tradition, and the tides of modernity.
Ahdaf Soueif — The Map of Love - Cairo as political crossroads and emotional landscape.
Mumbai
Rohinton Mistry — A Fine Balance - Mumbai as crowded, tender, brutal, intimate.
Aravind Adiga — Last Man in Tower - A city of ambition and moral compromise, almost mythic in scale.
Tehran
Marjane Satrapi — Persepolis - Tehran as childhood, revolution, fear, and fierce wit.
Shahrnush Parsipur — Women Without Men - Magical-realist Tehran shaped by patriarchy, politics, and dream logic.
Paris
Patrick Modiano — Missing Person - Paris as fogged memory and existential searching.
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Leïla Slimani — Adèle - Paris as polished surfaces masking psychological fissures.
Berlin
Jenny Erpenbeck — Visitation - A house on a lake outside Berlin as the city’s historic soul.
Wladimir Kaminer — Russian Disco - Berlin as immigrant chaos, humour, reinvention.
Mexico City
Roberto Bolaño — The Savage Detectives - Mexico City as literary frenzy, youth, dust, disappearance.
Valeria Luiselli — Faces in the Crowd - A city that echoes, and haunts - fragmented and brilliant.
Seoul
Han Kang — The Vegetarian. Seoul as alienation, intensity, and pressure.
Cho Nam-Joo — Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982. A city exposing structural and emotional realities of contemporary womanhood.
Rio de Janeiro
Clarice Lispector — The Hour of the Star - Rio as philosophical backdrop: glittering, indifferent, existential.
Paulo Lins — City of God - An explosive portrait of Rio’s favelas and their internal logic.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this journey through how city becomes character in writing. What are some of your favourite city/story pairings?
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Happy Reading!
Until next time,
Laura
Laura McVeigh
Author, Travel Writer, Storyteller
lauramcveigh.com | lauramcveightravel.com | travel-writing.com | greentravelguides.world
Laura McVeigh is an internationally bestselling Northern Irish novelist and travel writer. Her work is widely translated. Her latest novel Lenny is set between Libya and Louisiana. She has authored books for Lonely Planet, DK Travel, been published by Bradt Guides, bylines in the Irish Times, Irish Independent, featured by the BBC, Newsweek, New Internationalist & many more. A former CEO for a global writers’ organisation, working with writers from 145 countries, she is founder of Travel-Writing.Com and Green Travel Guides. Laura writes on storytelling, travel writing and mindful travel on Substack.
I have just read The Vegetarian. What an excellent book, and Seoul is captured quite well in it. I would add Mrs. Dalloway to the London list, recently finished also. For Paris, I know it's autobiographical but Hemingway's A Moveable Feast captures the era and the city beautifully. And Baldwin's Giovanni's Room set in the same city. And of course, for Florence, A Room With a View. 😍❤️
Love Underworld. Such a great example. Back when I was in the music business, I always felt the same about music. Even though most pop songs don't locate themselves in any specific way, I always gravitated to artists who carried with them a sense of place that's somehow imbedded in their music-- Springsteen and New Jersey, Gershwin and New York, Allen Toussaint and New Orleans, etc. I think things don't feel quite real or believable unless we have a real sense as to "where" they come from.