Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
Neil Hanson
The Dreadful Judgement
. A docu-fiction
account in which modern scientific methods and historical
knowledge are applied to the Fire of London so vividly you
can almost feel the heat.
Aldous Huxley
Point Counter Point
. Sharp satire of
London's high-society wastrels and dilettantes of the
Roaring Twenties.
Henry James
The Awkward Age
. Light, ironic portrayal of
London high society at the turn of the twentieth century.
Hanif Kureishi
The Buddha of Suburbia
;
Love in a
Blue Time
;
My
Ear at His Heart
.
The Buddha of Suburbia
is
a raunchy account of life as an Anglo-Asian in late-1960s
suburbia, and the art scene of the 1970s;
Love in a Blue
Time
is a collection of short stories set in 1990s London;
My Ear at His Heart
is a biography of Kureishi's father
from his privileged childhood in Mumbai to a life in
Bromley.
Andrea Levy
Small Island.
A warm-hearted novel in
which postwar London struggles to adapt to the influx of
Jamaicans who in turn find that the land of their dreams is
full of prejudice.
Colin MacInnes
Absolute Beginners
;
Omnibus
.
Absolute
Beginners
, a story of life in Soho and Notting Hill in the
1950s - much influenced by Selvon (see above) - is
infinitely better than the film of the same name.
Omnibus
is set in 1957, in a Victoria Station packed with hopeful
black immigrants; white welfare o
cer meets black man
from Lagos with surprising results.
Somerset Maugham
Liza of Lambeth.
Maugham
considered himself a “second-rater”, but this early novel,
written in 1897, about Cockney lowlife, is packed with vivid
local colour.
Ì
Ian McEwan
Saturday.
Set on the day of a protest
march against the war in Iraq, this topic captures the mood
of London post-9/11, as the main character is forced to
consider his attitude to this and many other issues.
Timothy Mo
Sour Sweet
. Very funny and very sad story of
a newly arrived Chinese family struggling to understand
the English way of life in the 1970s, written with great
insight by Mo, who is himself of mixed parentage.
Michael Moorcock
Mother London
. A magnificent,
rambling, kaleidoscopic portrait of London from the Blitz to
Thatcher by a once-fashionable, but now very much
underrated, writer.
Iris Murdoch
Under the Net
;
The Black Prince
;
An Accidental
Man
;
Bruno's Dream
.
Under the Net
was Murdoch's first,
funniest and arguably her best novel, published in 1954,
starring a hack writer living in London. Many of her
subsequent works are set in various parts of middle-class
London and span several decades of the second half of the
twentieth century.
George Orwell
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
. Orwell's 1930s
critique of Mammon is equally critical of its chief
protagonist, whose attempt to rebel against the system
only condemns him to poverty, working in a London
bookshop and freezing his evenings away in a miserable
rented room.
Jonathan Raban
Soft City
. An early work from 1974
that's both a portrait of, and paean to, metropolitan life.
Ì
Derek Raymond
Not till the Red Fog Rises.
A book
which “reeks with the pervasive stench of excrement” as
Iain Sinclair (see below) put it, this is a lowlife spectacular
set in the seediest sections of the capital.
Barnaby Rogerson
(ed)
London: Poetry of Place.
A
delightful pocket-sized book complete with potted
biographies of the poets.
Edward Rutherford
London
. A big, big novel (perhaps
too big) that stretches from Roman times to the present
and deals with the most dramatic moments of London's
history. Masses of historical detail woven in with the story
of several families.
Samuel Selvon
The Lonely Londoners
. “Gives us the smell
and feel of this rather horrifying life. Not for the squeamish”,
ran the quote from the
Evening Standard
on the original
cover. This is, in fact, a wry and witty account of the African-
Caribbean experience in London in the 1950s.
Ì
Iain Sinclair
White Chappell, Scarlet Tracings
;
Downriver
;
Radon Daughters
. Sinclair's idiosyncratic and
richly textured novels are a strange mix of Hogarthian
caricature, New Age mysticism and conspiracy-theory rant.
Deeply offensive and highly recommended.
Stevie Smith
Novel on Yellow Paper
. Poet Stevie Smith's
first novel takes place in the publishing world of the
London of 1930s.
Zadie Smith
White Teeth; NW
. White Teeth is her highly
acclaimed and funny first novel about race, gender and
class in the ethnic melting pot of north London.
NW
follows
the fortunes of four Londoners from a council estate
through the labyrinth of urban life in northwest London.
John Sommerfield
May Day.
Set in the revolutionary
fervour of the 1930s, this novel is “as if Mrs Dalloway was
written by a Communist Party bus driver”, in the words of
one reviewer.
Muriel Spark
The Bachelors
;
The Ballad of Peckham Rye
.
Two London-based novels written one after the other by
the Scots-born author, best known for
The Prime of Miss
Jean Brodie
.
Edith Templeton
Gordon
. A tale of sex and humiliation in
postwar London, banned in the 1960s when it was
published under a pseudonym (Louisa Walbrook).
Rose Tremain
The Road Home
. The moving story of Lev,
an Eastern European economic migrant, who heads for
London and finds the streets are not paved with gold in the
late twentieth century.
Sarah Waters
A
nity
;
Fingersmith
;
Tipping the Velvet;
and
The Night Watch.
Racy modern novels set in Victorian
London:
A
nity
is set in the spiritualist milieu,
Fingersmith
focuses on an orphan girl, while
Tipping the Velvet
is about
