Victor Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 1831
As a visitor it's almost impossible not to see the splendid Notre-Dame Cathedral through the eyes of Victor Hugo and his creation Quasimodo.
"When, after groping your way lengthily up the gloomy spiral staircase, which rises vertically up through the thick wall of the bell towers, you abruptly emerged at last on to one of the two lofty platforms, flooded with air and daylight, a beautiful panorama unfolded itself …"
• Ile de la Cité, 4th arrondissement
Graham Robb, Parisians, 2010
From 1750 to the new millennium, Graham Robb's Parisians introduces us to the people and places of Paris. Here, he recounts an atmospheric cycle journey beside the canals of north-eastern Paris.
"With its jostling crowds and tatty shops, (La Chapelle) has more of the big city about it than the delicate stage sets of central Paris. Across the road from the church … there is a view of the Sacré-Coeur on its ant-hill of roofs and chimneys. Far below, trains rattle through the deep cutting towards the Gare du Nord."
• Impasse de Curé, 18th arrondissement
T E Carhart, The Piano Shop on the Left Bank, 2000
The sights, the smells, the atmosphere of a very special part of the city, evoked by T E Carhart, an American living in Paris, who discovers a piano repair shop on the Left Bank.
"Summer set in early and the sidewalks in the quartier came alive after hours. In a city where few apartments are air-conditioned, the terraces of cafés become the common refuge from a withering heat in the evening."
• rue St Jacques, 5th arrondissement, Latin Quarter
Jeremy Mercer, Books, Baguettes and Bedbugs, 2005
The world around the Left Bank's famous bookshop Shakespeare and Company - haunt of literary giants from Hemingway and Joyce to Ginsberg and Burroughs and still going strong.
"Shakespeare and Company sits on the very left edge of the Left Bank. The store is close enough to the Seine that when one is standing in the front doorway, a well-thrown apple core will easily reach river water."
• 37 rue Bûcherie, 5th arrondissement, opposite Notre-Dame
Muriel Barbery, The Elegance of the Hedgehog, 2008
Life behind the façades of a grand Parisian apartment building in the very respectable 7th arrondissement, an insight into the secrets of the building's concierge and its residents.
"My name is Renée. I am fifty-four years old. For twenty-seven years I have been the concierge at number 7, rue de Grenelle, a fine hôtel particulier with a courtyard and private gardens, divided into eight luxury apartments …"
• rue de Grenelle, 7th arrondissement
Claude Izner, Murder on the Eiffel Tower, 2007
The brand-new Eiffel Tower – the glory of the 1889 Universal Exhibition – is at the centre of this dazzling murder mystery set in late 19th-century Paris.
"Pointing straight up into the sky on the other side of the Seine, Gustav Eiffel's bronze-coloured tower was reminiscent of a giant streetlamp topped with gold. Panic-stricken, Eugénie searched for a pretext to get out of climbing it."
• 7th arrondissement
Edmund de Waal, The Hare With Amber Eyes, 2010
The plush rue de Monceau is at the heart of de Waal's tour de force: once the home of his great grandfather Charles Ephrussi on whom Proust based his own Charles Swann.
"Rue de Monceau is a long Parisian street bisected by the grand boulevard Malesherbes that charges off towards the boulevard Pereire. It is a hill of golden-stone houses … Number 81 rue de Monceau, the Hôtel Ephrussi, where my netsuke start their journey, is near the top of the hill."
• 81 rue de Monceau near parc Monceau, 8th arrondissement
Louis Aragon, Paris Peasant, 1926
Paris Peasant is a surrealist masterpiece that uses every resource of language to evoke Paris and the extraordinary Buttes-Chaumont park in what was the working class east of the city.
"This great oasis in a popular district, a shady zone where the prevailing atmosphere is distinctly murderous, this crazy area born in the head of an architect from the conflict between Jean-Jacques Rousseau and the economic conditions of existence in Paris."
• Buttes-Chaumont, 19th arrondissemen
Richard Davenport-Hines, A Night at the Majestic, 2006
All the luxury and glamour of Rive Droite Paris, just off the Champs Elysées, as Picasso, Stravinsky, Diaghilev, Joyce and Proust meet at the Majestic Hotel for the artistic dinner of the century. The hotel is now re-named the Raphael.
"It is a May evening in Paris in 1922 … A supper party is being held in a private dining room at the Majestic, an hôtel de luxe in avenue Kléber, one of the twelve avenues named after Napoleon's generals which radiate out from the Arc de Triomphe."
• 17 avenue Kléber, near Arc de Triomphe, 16th arrondissement
Emile Zola, The Ladies' Delight (Au Bonheur des Dames), 1883
Emile Zola brings to pulsating life the glittering and chic department store based on Le Bon Marché. Designed by Eiffel, it is still thriving today.
"It was like the concourse of a railway station, surrounded by the balustrades of the two upper storeys, cut by suspended stairways and crisscrossed with bridges. And all this cast iron beneath the white light of the glass roof composed an airy architecture of complicated lacework."
• 24 rue de Sèvres, 7th arrondissement
• Malcolm Burgess is the publisher of Oxygen Books' City-lit series featuring some of the best-ever writing on favourite world cities, oxygenbooks.co.uk
