A collection of maps and essays that serve as esoteric thematic guides, Infinite City is a catalogue of its author's obsessive interests. But when you hit the City by the Bay, delve into Infinite City, Rebecca Solnit's imaginative po-mo atlas of San Fran.

Read Kerouac's On The Road if you're driving west (or Vollmann's phone-book-thick The Royal Family if you're walking). Cal's struggle with gender identity captures the push-pull of racial tension, violence and conflicting ideology in Detroit, the story of a city – and a nation – that sparks to life in all its flinty contradictions.

Jeffrey Eugenides's Pulitzer-winning second novel traces the genetic heritage of its intersex protagonist, Cal (née Calliope) across three generations of Greek immigrants, illustrating the (sometimes broken) promise of the American Dream. The Motor City's much-publicized death – and slow rebirth as a carte blanche metropolis inviting everyone from urban explorers to investors looking to reinvent the city – has served as a handy stand in for the whole American experiment. In Bottle Rocket Hearts, set during the tense weeks anticipating the 1995 referendum, Quebec's identity crisis informs the story of Eve, an angst-ridden young women pulled between notions of Anglo and Franco, young and old, straight and queer. Though Zoe Whittall has since defected to Toronto, the Quebec-born novelist's 2007 work remains a classic of Montreal lit. Montreal has no shortage of great authors: from Anglos supping on the city's cultural riches (Leonard Cohen, Mordecai Richler) to those tenuously carving out a meaningful Québécois identity among the metropolitan swell (Gabrielle Roy).

Bottle Rocket Hearts by Zoe Whittall