vallierojas: 10 of the best books set in London

Malcolm Burgess, publisher of the City-Lit series, selects his favourite reads for the Smoke

? As featured in our London city guide

Colin MacInnes, Absolute Beginners, 1959

It evocatively celebrates a time and a place ? 1958, Notting Hill ? where youthful rebellion and multiculturalism are stirring out of London's post-war slumber.

"Cool, this is London, not some hick city in the provinces! This is London, man, a capital, a great big city where every kind of race has lived ever since the Romans."
? Notting Hill

Helen Simpson, Title story from Constitutional, 2005

A teacher makes the most of her lunch-hour on Hampstead Heath, enjoying the views and the snippets of conversation.

"From that hill up there to my left it's possible to see for miles, and on a clear day I can pinpoint my road in Dalston. A skipper on the Thames looked up here at the northern heights three centuries ago and exclaimed ? the hills were capped with snow. The Heath's low trees and bushes were festooned with clean shirts and smocks hung out to dry."
? Hampstead Heath

Monica Ali, Brick Lane, 2003

In Monica Ali's novel, Chanu and his family discover a rich and varied London, including the delights of the East End's Brick Lane.

"Nazneen walked a step behind her husband down Brick Lane. The bright green and red pendants that fluttered from the lamp-posts advertised the Bangla colours and basmati rice. In the restaurant windows were clippings from newspapers and magazines with the name of the restaurant highlighted in yellow or pink."
? Brick Lane

Sukhdhev Sandhu, Night Haunts, 2006

London from the air at night has its own special beauty, as Sukdhev Sandhu discovers when he accompanies those who patrol the city's skies between nightfall and dawn.

"The streets of London are made from gold. But only at night time and only from the sky. They lie there glimmering like a Hatton Garden window display. Jewelled necklaces winking at us. At Piccadilly Circus and along Oxford Street the refracted neon gives them a ruby-red and emerald-green lustre."
? Oxford Street

Charles Dickens, Bleak House, 1852-3

The famous murky opening of Bleak House amid the law courts of Lincoln's Inn Field suggests a moral fog as well as a meteorological one that will soon overwhelm its characters.

"Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets, as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill."
? Chancery Lane/High Holborn

Xiaolu Guo, A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers, 2007

In the first novel by this Chinese author, her narrator lives in Hackney and experiences culture shock with every step she takes. A traditional greasy spoon caf� has to be part of the authentic city experience ?

"The caf� is name greasy spoon, Seven Seas. All windows is foggy from the steam. You order tea as soon as you walk into. Noisy. Babies. Mothers. Couples. Lonely old man. You are opening the newspaper and start drink thick English Breakfast milky tea."
? Hackney

Keith Waterhouse, Soho, 2001

A wonderful writer on the city's quirks and peccadilloes, here in Soho with a cast of unforgettable characters. His play Jeffrey Bernard is Unwell mines similar Soho territory.

"Except for the city itself, which after working hours is left to the caretakers and the cats and the odd penthouse millionaire, there is no London neighbourhood more resembling the restless downstream tide of the Thames than the ragged square mile of Soho."
? Soho

Iain Sinclair, Downriver, 1991

Along the Thames and within its nearby communities, Iain Sinclair's fascinating novel of psychogeography traces how the river has changed - but also what remains from the past.

"The true history of Whitechapel is here, unseen, invisible from the public streets. Lost gardens, courtyards whose entrances have been eliminated, shacks buried in vegetation like Mayan temples ? You could hack a path into the thicket and converse - as a contemporary - with the dead centuries."
? Whitechapel

Gillian Tindall, The House by the Thames, 2006

The southern end of the Millenium Bridge is very close to a small, ancient house, 49 Bankside, whose story is the history of London itself.

"What were originally the 'mean streets' and 'dirty dark alleys' of waterside Thames are now extremely expensive real-estate, a cosmopolitan ribbon worlds away from the drab hinterlands behind them. In this ribbon, 49 Bankside, with its old-fashioned lamp, stands at night like a forgotten cottage in a children's story."
? South Bank beside Millenium Bridge

Virginia Woolf, Mrs Dalloway

Mrs Dalloway lives in Westminster and Virginia Woolf brilliantly describes a day in her London life, stepping out on a glorious summer morning, Big Ben striking in the background.

"For having lived in Westminster ? how many years now? over twenty, ? one feels even in the midst of the traffic, or waking at night, Clarissa was positive, a particular hush, or solemnity; an indescribable pause; a suspense ? before Big Ben strikes. There! Out it boomed."
?Westminster

? 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

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