The following passage from Robert Irwin's astonishingly brilliant The Arabian Nightmare, in which a character traverses a chessboard-like Cairo, recalls our own manual on using a game of chess to construct a story: If A Chessman Were A Word: A Chess-Calvino Dictionary.

Crossing the open spaces of the city was like moving across a chess board, chill and dark in the shadows, still brilliantly warm in the places the sun could reach.  He was crossing a dark square now near the Bab al-Luq, where the rich merchants' houses were, when he saw a face, high up in the dark shadows of an upper-storey casement, staring down at him.  It was a woman's face, round and plump and shining silver as if it was the moon.

Deliciously, the character in Irwin's novel is about to confront a knight!