Michelle de Kretser in Richmond. Photo: Roger Cummins

Melbourne is a city divided. We love to carve it up, to find evermore ways to insist that it's more than just indistinguishable grey. The river that bisects us becomes a symbol of north versus south. Our footy teams mark the imaginary territories of warring tribes. Tram lines develop followers and the characters of suburbs are more familiar to us than the people who populate them. Even the weather seems to conspire against a stable identity.
Then there's the writing. It's more appropriate to speak of Melbourne in the plural, and our authors have given us more Melbournes than any one city deserves. The Sunday Age asked a range of Melburnians with a readerly bent to nominate the book that best describes their Melbourne. The responses take us from the swamps of 1850s Mordialloc and the gaslit inner-city byways of the 1800s to the kebab shops and delis of Sydney Road today.
To beg a favourite of Melbourne Writers Festival director Steve Grimwade seems akin to demanding of him his favourite child. His head tells him to nominate James Boyce's 1835, a historical account of the city's founding, but his heart takes him to ''those books which bring memory alive''. Christos Tsiolkas' Loaded ''helps me recall slightly younger years, vital with music and dancing. Unlike The Slap, which makes me think of my current years, amidst screaming kids.''
Christos Tsiolkas.Christos Tsiolkas in an inner Melbourne laneway. Photo: Wayne Taylor

But most often, Grimwade says, ''it's the poets I return to, their distillations of Melbourne a Melway map to my heart: from Alicia Sometimes' St Kilda via Kieran Carroll's [Talking to] Richmond Station to the sly-grog joints of Pi O's Collingwood.
''Whenever I'm traipsing across the city and I want a grin, I bring to mind any of Shane Maloney's trilogy, with Murray Whelan making his gloriously cynical way across town to unravel a story of intrigue while his own life is unravelling around him.''
Grimwade is just one respondent to name-check that most archetypal fictional Melburnian. Author Robert Newton picks the first of the Whelan trilogy, Stiff, as his favourite evocation of the city, offering a passage to prove the point: ''Melbourne's main north-south axis was a clotted artery of souvlaki joints and low-margin, high-turnover business. Half the Mediterranean Basin had been depopulated of its optimists in order to line Sydney Road with free-wheeling enterprise. Bakeries and furniture shops run by Abruzzesi and Calabresi sat cheek by jowl with the delicatessens of Peloponnesian Greeks and the bridal boutiques of Maronite Lebanese … The promise of strong black coffee loitered in the air and through the windows of the Cafe de la Paix, the Tivoli and the Lakonia I could see men bent over tiny cups of bracing black nectar …''
Author Fergus Hume.Fergus Hume, writer of the 1886 thriller, The Mystery of the Hanson Cab.
''A master of the one-liner,'' Newton says. ''Maloney's writing forces you to stop and reread the many gems that are littered throughout the pages and his description of Chinatown had me craving Peking duck. If someone asked me to choose three people I'd invite to a dinner party, Murray Whelan would be the first.''
Kate Holden first read Helen Garner's Monkey Grip about 25 years ago, but one image in the novel is still fixed in her mind: ''It comes to me on warm nights, when Melbourne exhales its particular intoxicating evening fragrance of cooling bluestone, cat pee, peppercorn trees, naked skin, burnt moths in street lights, lemon-tree leaves and beer.''