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Iris Murdoch’s first novel makes the pubs of 1950s London key characters as a down-at-heel writer roams the city from a shabby Earl’s Court base, trying to square philosophy, political ideas, and reality.

It brings to life a London where people without money could live in the center, and social life was all about who you ran into. This was a place that was still as much a village as a global city.  

Published in 1957, this book is one of the few comic novels about London, and it is genuinely funny.

In a dead-end suburb, variety entertainment is dying a painful death in a flea-pit cinema that attracts a parade of fantastical characters, from the Falstaffian impresario Sam Yudenow to a pair of Greek caterers and bomb makers.

It makes a lost world seem both alluring and deeply unsavoury.

In the early 1990s Soho, Robinson is a charming, possibly Satanic character who leads film editor Christo into a world of sleazy bars, drink, drugs, and general depravity.

It is the last gasp of Soho that died with the old century—the mysterious, legendary neighbourhood that London somehow revolved around. Petit makes it gleam darkly. 

A tale of West London in the 1930s, Westerby brings to life a lost world of gamblers looking for mugs at the long-gone White City dog track.

Local teenager Jim teeters on the edge of the criminal underworld in a thriller woven into a London you can almost taste—teeming with life and the inevitability of death in the shadow of the coming war.  

The Alex Versus series's world-building, magic, and plots are very complex and layered. This is some seriously well thought out urban fantasy. 

The main character, Alex, is basically an instant seer, able to see multiple consequences of diving left versus right, shooting someone, running, etc. He doesn’t always have time to evaluate his choices before having to make a decision. And often, there’s no out without loss or a high price to be paid. 

The back story is cleverly woven into the plot and is never boring. This series has one of my favorite side characters ever written—an arachnid with startling insight and wisdom. 

Leaving Piccadilly for the moment, we have the adult western. As if the name of the genre and the name that starts every book title isn’t enough, it’s published by Playboy. And as you might have guessed from there being four hundred of these books, put out damn near monthly since the seventies, it’s a bit of a fool’s errand to single out any one book. They’re somewhere between the formulaic nature of needing to be a Western with literally obligatory sex and violence, and the author being a house name that’ll change with any given volume, who by necessity will have his own idiosyncratic take on the material. 

One book, you might get a writer that’s really into delivering the sex appeal promised by the cover. Another time, you’ll get someone who just wants to write a Western (if that: people weren’t writing these things for their health,… show more.

This is a gorgeous book to be savoured slowly.

It is suffused with music throughout (and the nerd within me loves the reoccurring literary motifs and phrases that definitely lend a musical quality to the book) and took me back to lazy summer days as a teenager when I first moved to London and the city felt wide open with excitement and possibility.

This is another love story, but one about community, family and the first loves that we learn from our parents.

With Charles Dickens investigating, I had to check this out. The author’s imaginative use of Dickens as a sleuth is rooted in facts new to me. I didn’t know he had set up a sanctuary for fallen women, for example. Having read much Dickens, I found the voice authentic. His Victorian world, so intense in his novels, was equally immersive here – the poverty, the dirt, the inequality – and I became thoroughly involved in the story and the unfolding investigation. If an author can draw me into their world and hold me… this did, due to impressive detailed research. I was particularly struck by the compassion visible in this Dickens which made me realise how much his books also demonstrate this aspect of his character.

Before settling into the chronicle of the title character, this first entry in the Undertaker series (from the author of the much longer-running Edge books as well) follows a circuitous course involving an unfaithful wife and a vengeful husband. I won’t spoil the surprises along the way, but the Undertaker himself pushes the Western antihero to its limit. He’s all but emotionless, very nearly a sociopath, but with a certain competence and honor that gives him an appeal. (Even though he’s further saddled by the lame catchphrase ‘Bye-bye.’) I actually find his semi-autistic callousness more bearable than Steele’s more willful nastiness, since it seems the Undertaker was simply born the way he is, rather than choosing it.

You’ll recognize certain plot points from these books remixed into my book, though I found the Undertaker’s continued lack of character development a bit grating from one book to the next. That’s the… show more.

This poignant, tragi-comedy of a novel is both relatable and uplifting.

And though the protagonist is going through a bit of a crisis, it’s ultimately a story of a woman finding herself and coming into her own.

Grace’s relationship with her teenage daughter is so well described – as mum of a teen girl I recognised the sadness she felt when she realised her daughter needed her less than she’d used to.