How do you put London into words? This city is so vast in scope, so teeming with culture, so full of contradictions and so ever-changing that nailing down its essence is no easy task. Dickens crowned it a ‘magic lantern’, Arthur Conan Doyle saw it as a ‘great cesspool’, Sam Selvon decried it as a ‘lonely miserable city’ while Virginia Woolf extolled it as somewhere that ‘perpetually attracts’ and ‘stimulates’.
For World Book Day, Time Out spoke to five authors who have lived and breathed London to get their take on which books capture the city best. But don’t expect any over-romantic tributes. These are works that get into the nitty gritty of the capital, revealing its good, bad and ugly. Get to know London on a deeper level and add these to your TBR list, pronto.
Andrew O’Hagan: ‘The Way We Live Now’ by Anthony Trollope (1875)
‘There are novels that capture London’s appearance, but the ones I love best reveal the secret energies of the city. None is better in this respect than Trollope’s masterpiece ‘The Way We Live Now’. From the first page you have London as a place in the mind, a social web, a world of gentlemen’s clubs and financial deals and literary magazines and workplaces. London is unique in having a central place in the whole world’s conception of itself, and Trollope gets that. He sees how if London is morally ailing then it probably means there is something wrong with the whole country. But what an entertainment this novel is! You can’t put it down, turning the pages with a sort of disbelief, as one by one the story gives up its secrets and the novel buzzes with human life.’
‘Caledonian Road’ by Andrew O’Hagan is out in paperback now.
Yomi Adegoke: ‘Hope and Glory’ by Jendella Benson (2022)
‘When blurbing Jendella Benson’s evocative debut ‘Hope and Glory’, my original lengthy, gushing quote was cut down to just four words in order to fit the jacket: ‘so deliciously South London’. It perfectly sums up this intimately told story set against the bustling backdrop of a quickly gentrifying Peckham. The book follows a British-Nigerian woman, Glory, who returns to her hometown of ‘‘Little Lagos’’ after the sudden death of her father. Peckham is almost a character itself in Benson’s beautifully drawn world, as lively, layered and contradictory as the wider cast. Amidst all the familial strife and devastating secrets, there is still plenty of space dedicated to its South London charm.’
‘The List’ by Yomi Adegoke is out now in paperback.
Guy Gunaratne: ‘London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City’ by Sukhdev Sandhu (2003)
‘London Calling: How Black and Asian Writers Imagined a City is a social history of literary London that takes in works by writers such as Ignatius Sancho, Salman Rushdie, Hanif Kureishi and Victor Headley. Sandhu examines how literary traditions of often overlooked immigrant stories have come to form the fabric of the city itself. I recall reading this book in my late teens – it was the first time I’d come across many of these writers. It opened London up to me in ways that have since become life-altering, and is one of the books I’d count as formative to my own journey into writing. The book itself works as an expansive and important cultural handbook as it does a lively, populous narrative. I’m grateful it exists at all.’
‘Mister, Mister’ by Guy Gunaratne is out now in paperback.
Oisín McKenna: ‘Savage Messiah’ by Laura Oldfield Ford (2011)
‘Part of my overriding experience of London is a sense that certain places don’t feel like real places. Property development, privatisation, and the gutting of the welfare state have created a city which is exponentially more expensive, but greatly depleted of cultural vitality. Laura Grace Ford’s Savage Messiah, compiled from her series of zines, details this loss in sprawling, vivid detail. Part work of psycho-geography, part graphic novel, part something else entirely, it’s a vital, artful, and sensually rich act of documentation, urgently observing the life of a city as swathes of its physical and cultural landscape are lost to privatisation.’
‘Evenings and Weekends’ by Oisín McKenna is out in paperback on April 24.
Roxy Dunn: ‘Expectation’ by Anna Hope (2019)
‘Ironically, I first came across this book in Norfolk where I was staying during the first lockdown, but it immediately transported me back to London. There’s something so evocative and relatable about the prose that captures the lives of the three female friends at the centre of the story. But it’s more than just the references to all the familiar place names that makes this book so intrinsically linked to London for me; it’s the feeling of hope, disillusionment, and as the title aptly says – expectation – that this city gives you, that the novel manages to so beautifully and painfully capture.’
‘As Young As This’ by Roxy Dunn is out now.
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