8 Setting Examples From Bestselling Fiction

Setting is more than just a simple backdrop — it’s the dynamic stage where every great story comes to life. At its most basic level, setting refers to the time, place, and environment where a story unfolds. This can be a real place, like the bustling streets of London, or a fantastical realm, like the enchanted world of Narnia. 

Either way, setting works as a subtle force that drives the plot forward, shapes your characters' worldview, and reinforces your story's themes — making it a critical element to get right. In this article, I’ll take you through eight setting examples that do exactly that. 

Now that I’ve “set the scene,” let’s enter the wonderful world of setting!

1. The Martian, Andy Weir

In Andy Weir’s dramatic yet witty sci-fi novel, Mars is not just a randomly chosen setting. On the contrary, the entire story depends on it. After astronaut Mark Watney is left stranded with limited resources and no connection to Earth, he comes to the terrifying realization that every aspect of Mars — its atmosphere, weather patterns, and isolation — is pitted against his survival:

“If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.”

Needless to say, Mars is not just a passive backdrop for Mark's mission; it’s the force that makes his mission necessary in the first place. Its hostile environment serves as an active antagonist, presenting new challenges and obstacles in every scene. 

Above all, the isolation of Mars amplifies every small problem. While a broken piece of equipment might be a slight inconvenience on Earth, it's potentially fatal on Mars. Here, this setting choice transforms what would have been a simple survival story into a nail-biting thriller where readers hang on every tiny calculation and engineering solution in awe.

💡Writing Tip: List all the ways your setting might threaten, challenge, or complicate your character's goals. Remember: the more hostile or unpredictable your environment, the higher your story's natural tension will be.

2. Where The Crawdads Sing, Delia Owens

Let’s head back down to Earth for our next setting example. In this 2018 novel, Delia Owens transports us to the 1950s, with a setting that’s a tad more familiar than the dusty plains of Mars — the North Carolina marshes. 

Where the Crawdads Sing follows the story of Kya, a young woman who was abandoned as a child in the aforementioned Southern marshes. However, as Kya grows up, the marsh becomes more than an atmospheric backdrop: it’s her home, protector, teacher, and source of both her isolation and her independent strength.

Owens brings this setting to life by using specific geographical details, local dialect, native species, and historical context to anchor the story in the American South. The marsh ecosystem, with its tides, wildlife, and seasonal changes, creates a natural rhythm that reflects Kya’s own emotional journey.

The marsh is a physical sanctuary for Kya, yet also something of a social and emotional prison. While it allows her to escape from a harsh and hostile community, it also prevents her from making connections or being able to trust others. This powerful duality shows that thoroughly researched, authentic locations have the potential to become vital parts of characters' lives.

💡Writing Tip: Research real locations thoroughly, even if you're creating fiction. Study maps, local newspapers, weather patterns, and cultural details. Authenticity in these details creates believability in larger plot elements.

3. On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong

Stay with me now, we’re getting personal. In Ocean Vuong’s deeply poetic novel, our narrator — a young Vietnamese-American man named Little Dog — writes a letter to his illiterate mother about their family history and his own experiences. In this letter, he reflects on his complex identity, family history, and the pain of growing up between two cultures. 

Here, setting is intimately tied to character memory and emotion. Take, for example, the narrator's description of the nail salon where his mother worked:

“The salon is also a kitchen where, in the back rooms, our women squat on the floor over huge woks that pop and sizzle over electric burners, cauldrons of pho simmer and steam up the cramped spaces with aromas of cloves, cinnamon, ginger, mint, and cardamom mixing with formaldehyde, toluene, acetone, Pine-sol, and bleach. A place where folklore, rumors, tall tales, and jokes from the old country are told, expanded, laughter erupting in back rooms the size of rich people’s closets, then quickly lulled into an eerie, untouched quiet.”

For Little Dog, the salon is more than just a physical space; it’s a culmination of senses that are woven into his identity. In just a few lines, Vuong's memoir-novel creates the same effect for the reader — immersing them with the chatter of colleagues in back rooms and the smell of nail salon chemicals. Through this description, we see how the salon is a bridge of sorts between past and present, Vietnam and America, and childhood and adulthood — symbolizing many of the same inner struggles and shifts that Little Dog himself undergoes. 

💡Writing Tip: Use sensory details beyond sight to make settings immersive — how does your setting sound, smell, taste, or feel?

4. The Lord of the Rings, J. R. R. Tolkien

The most memorable stories don't just happen anywhere — they happen in places so vivid and integral that the story couldn't exist anywhere else. This is definitely the case for Tolkien’s portrayal of Middle Earth, which still stands as one of the richest settings in the world of fiction. 

What sets Tolkien apart from other authors is the level of depth in every single detail of his writing. The Shire isn’t just a pleasant area in the countryside with rolling hills; it has its own levels of society, cultural traditions, and agricultural practices. 

Equally, Rivendell isn’t just a beautiful valley — it’s a kingdom of elvish wisdom with its own architectural style and philosophical outlook. Even Mordor, seemingly a decrepit wasteland, has its own military organization, geography, and industrial infrastructure.

By taking the time to create such immersive worlds, Tolkien makes his settings feel essential as opposed to decorative. The geography affects travel times, the culture creates diplomatic disagreements, and the history provides crucial context for current conflicts.

💡Writing Tip: Build your setting with specific details — consider geography, culture, language, and history — to create a world that feels real and textured.

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5. Orbital, Samantha Harvey

Some settings, like Middle Earth, are memorable for their concrete worldbuilding. Others, like the Milky Way of Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, are more abstract — yet the language used to describe this setting arguably has an even more profound effect.

Orbital, which takes place over 24 hours, follows six astronauts on an orbiting space station as they grapple with humanity — both individually and at scale. Fittingly, Harvey uses setting personification to underscore this, with both space and planet Earth being described as almost living entities:

“Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it is stalking through their quarters.”

“Over its right shoulder the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light.”

Indeed, these aren't just poetic descriptions; they're examples of how setting can have its own kind of agency. Space "stalks," Earth "whispers," and both participate in the astronauts' psychological experience. The setting doesn't just influence the characters; it practically pursues them, communicates with them, and shapes their dreams. As a result, this technique transforms the sterile environment of a space station into something alive and emotionally resonant. 

💡Writing Tip: Give your setting agency through personification and active verbs. Instead of describing static features, show how your setting acts, reacts, and influences events.

6. Hamnet, Maggie O’Farrell

Ready to go back in time again — and not just decades this time, but centuries? In Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell, the "when" of the story is just as important as the "where." Set in Elizabethan England during a plague, Hamnet reimagines the life and death of Shakespeare's son, Hamnet — exploring the family’s grief and loss from an intimate vantage point. 

In this specific time period, death and uncertainty waits around every corner; particularly for children, every fever could be fatal and every separation could be permanent. In this way, the historical context of this novel doesn't just provide details of the period itself — it introduces readers to this uniquely fraught emotional landscape.

And O'Farrell doesn’t only cover major historical events, but the nitty-gritty texture of daily life: what people ate, how they traveled, what they feared, how they understood illness and death. These details create natural conflict and character limitations that feel authentic to the period, while remaining emotionally relevant to contemporary readers.

💡Writing Tip: When writing with a specific temporal location in mind, don’t focus too much on major historical events. Instead, immerse readers in the era’s emotional rhythms. Weave in period-specific anxieties and routines so their thoughts, actions, dialogue and more feel rooted in their world. 

7. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins

Moving toward the dystopian future now, let’s look at Suzanne Collins’ vision of Panem. In The Hunger Games, setting isn’t just a feat of worldbuilding — it's used to critique social and political issues. We’re introduced to District Twelve during the reaping for the 74th annual Hunger Games: an event in which two children from every district must enter a televised fight to the death.  

District Twelve is an emblem of systemic oppression, where the weight of poverty and authoritarian control is felt in every corner. Collins’ description of the Seam, the poorest part of the district, is particularly harrowing: 

“Our part of District 12, nicknamed the Seam, is usually crawling with coal miners heading out to the morning shift at this hour. Men and women with hunched shoulders, swollen knuckles, many who have long since stopped trying to scrub the coal dust out of their broken nails, the lines of their sunken faces. But today the black cinder streets are empty. Shutters on the squat gray houses are closed. The reaping isn’t until two. May as well sleep in. If you can.”

However, when Katniss and Peeta board the tribute train heading toward the Capitol, their setting changes quite drastically:

“The tribute train is fancier than even the room in the Justice Building. We are each given our own chambers that have a bedroom, a dressing area, and a private bathroom with hot and cold running water. We don’t have hot water at home, unless we boil it.

There are drawers filled with fine clothes, and Effie Trinket tells me to do anything I want, wear anything I want, everything is at my disposal. Just be ready for supper in an hour.”

District Twelve’s coal-covered streets and shuttered gray homes are proof of the Capitol’s iron grip, where every face and street is tainted by deprivation. When Katniss and Peeta board the Capitol train — with its lavish chambers and running hot water — the contrast feels like a gut punch. 

By juxtaposing the Seam’s reality of poverty with the Capitol’s grotesque excess, the book’s settings send a powerful message to us all: luxury can be weaponized to oppress and control those who do not have it. 

💡Writing Tip: Put your settings on double duty. Beyond their literal function, what do your locations represent thematically? Can a character's bedroom reflect their mental state? Can a city's architecture mirror social problems you're exploring?

8. The Midnight Library, Matt Haig

Get ready to disembark — we’ve reached our final destination. In Matt Haig’s The Midnight Library, setting completely transcends physical place to become a symbol for choice and consequence. 

This novel follows Nora Seed: a woman on the brink of despair who finds herself in a magic library. Straddling the boundary between life and death, the library is not just a never-ending corridor of bookshelves — it's a collection of doors that Nora never opened. Each volume in the library holds the magical promise of “what if?”, yet also pulls her into the paralysis of too much possibility. 

Though both use setting as symbols, The Hunger Games feels like more of a gritty cautionary tale for real life, while The Midnight Library takes a more dreamy, philosophical approach. The library mainly seeks to support the story’s existential themes; as a result, the setting has little need for detailed physical or temporal specificity. 

Rather, here we find an emotional landscape: a timeless, liminal area where Nora’s regrets, missed opportunities, and dreams can be examined without distraction. Whether your own novel seeks to highlight oppression or the weight of being human, an evocative, symbolic setting will help to engage your readers — and make your main message land even more powerfully.  

💡Writing Tip: When exploring universal themes, consider using a setting that is ethereal or symbolic, allowing readers to focus on the message rather than place.

Now that we’ve visited settings far and wide, it’s clear that setting is a multi-dimensional part of storytelling — with physical, temporal, social, emotional, and symbolic layers (but the degree of each depends entirely on your narrative). Remember, whether you’re writing a nail-biting survival story or a symbolic exploration of humanity, setting might just be the key to truly connecting with your readers.