Reading a novel about a place you've lived is a specific kind of experience that I don't have words for exactly. It's not recognition — it's something closer to the feeling of meeting someone who knows the same room you grew up in.

I read W.G. Sebald's The Emigrants after spending a year in Manchester, where one of the novel's sections is set. The description of a section of the city I walked through every week felt like being handed something personal back. Sebald's method — mixing fiction and documentary, history and personal testimony, photographs and prose — is more affecting when the coordinates are personal.

This is the case for reading locally. Find the writers who've written about where you are or where you're from. The geography changes the text.