David Foster Wallace · 1996 · exile

David Foster Wallace's 1996 novel, set in a near-future North America where the US, Canada and Mexico have merged and years are sold to corporate sponsors. It is a book of places rather than a journey: a tennis academy on a Boston hill, a halfway house directly below it, and a mountainside outside Tucson where two agents argue all night about what a person chooses to want.

1. 1
   Enfield Tennis Academy

   Wallace took the name from Enfield, Massachusetts, a town drowned in 1938 under the Quabbin Reservoir, and put it on a real hill in Brighton above the Brighton Marine complex. There is no academy; the hill is exactly as described.

2. 2
   Ennet House

   Directly downhill from the academy, which is the novel's whole architecture: privileged boys destroying themselves upward and recovering addicts working their way back up, on the same slope, meeting in the middle.

3. 3
   MIT

   The student union, which Wallace rebuilds in the shape of a human brain - the broadcast site of Madame Psychosis's late-night radio show, and the venue for a tennis tournament against Canadian youths that goes badly wrong.

4. 4
   The Great Concavity

   Northern New England and southeastern Canada, ceded to Canada by the Organization of North American Nations and used as a toxic waste dump - the alteration the novel runs on, and the reason Quebec separatists are in it.

5. 5
   Tucson

   A mountainside outside the city where Remy Marathe, a legless Quebec assassin, and Hugh Steeply, a US agent in unconvincing drag, argue all night about freedom and what a person chooses to want - which is the book's actual subject.