100 books like London Fields

When I say Slaughterhouse-Five is funny, people eye me like I’m a monster. But it is. The New York Times even has my back on this.

Is the novel also gut-wrenchingly tragic and horrifying? Of course. It’s one of the most potent stories ever written, and I’m not sure I’ve encountered anything whose biting satire eviscerates the absurdity of war (and of existence) so well.

Vonnegut balances humor and grief on the head of a pin: “Billy turned on the Magic Fingers, and he was jiggled as he wept.” 

With its repetition and echoing of phrases, Kafkaesque chronology, and circular logic, Catch-22 illustrates the absurdity of war more than any other novel I have read.

Every time pilot Yossarian, the book’s anti-hero, gets close to flying the number of bombing missions required to go home, the requirement is raised. A paradoxical catch keeps them flying. If you ask to be grounded because you understand the dangers, you aren’t insane. Insane soldiers just need to ask to be grounded. But asking proves you aren’t crazy.

Beneath the absurdist comedy, there is an existential dread at the heart of the book. The death of Yossarian’s friend Snowden leads him to see that ‘Man was matter.’ For me, this is the dreadful secret that war exposes - the precarious preciousness of life - as our fragile bodies are turned to quiet, still matter.

Of my favorites it was The Old Man and the Sea that held me riveted from the first line.

I felt I was walking behind the boy and the old man, listening in and watching them. How the boy loved the old man was how I loved ole Charlie in my novel. Hemingway took the patience to describe the old man and the boy’s thoughts and caring—how a framed picture of the ole man’s wife was face down on a shelf because seeing her was hard on him.

The night excursion alone couldn’t have been written if Hemingway hadn’t experienced it himself—it would seem. When sharks returned, this time, from the deep—I jolted as I was shaken when that Mississippi steamboat struck Huck’s raft. I tell students this short story is the best read ever to learn writing details as an artist would capture them in oil. 

I liked this book, not just because I’m a fan of detective stories, whodunnits, and the like, but more so for the deep dive into the understanding of why the antagonist, Francis, became what he became.

It’s hard to make a character believable when that character does things that, to most of us, are unthinkable, but the author here succeeds and wraps it up into a decent read.

This Pulitzer Prize winner remains a time-tested testament to the absurdity that is New Orleans.

I felt like I’d met every one of the characters at least twice in my own walks on the streets of this storied city. I could even taste the Lucky Dogs. This is one of the few books to have me consistently laugh out loud. You can even take a picture with the statue of Ignatius J Reilly (the main character) on Canal Street.

The scene is set at the start of this book with a prologue, a journal entry from one of the main characters, Dr Sheehan. It’s as if I’m reading his mind, or he is talking to me, the reader, and so we hit the ground running instantly–because when someone is talking to you, you listen.

The author took the time to paint vivid images in my head, but the story wasn’t slow. He was scene-setting, and it drew me right in. The twists were clever, the dialogue was natural, and it is understandable why Hollywood snapped up the rights to this book. For me, though, the way we get to know and understand Teddy Daniels and his troubles was just great storytelling. 

I could have picked anything by George Saunders, really. He’s the closest thing I have to a personal deity. Such is the level of awe and wonder that he invokes in me, I actually find him difficult to discuss. It’s like trying to look directly at the sun.

Suffice it to say that CivilWarLand in Bad Decline—the title refers to a failing theme park—is like all of his other short story collections. It’s beautiful and wise and heart-breaking and deeply intelligent and, yes, desperately funny. I would pay a lot of money to be able to read it again for the first time. 

I was attracted to this by the blurb on the cover that said this was part 1 of the Brentford trilogy. Brentford—a place in west London that I suspect is as innocent and unexceptional as my hometown of Croydon—has a trilogy? That’s got to be worth checking out. And it was. It’s a mash-up of genres with irreverence aplenty. The focus is a pub that’s probably closed down now (this was written in 1981) but it’s somewhere that sounds like the kind of establishment I would have frequented back in the day. Impossible to pigeonhole, The Antipope’s unpredictability kept me reading from behind my prescription sunglasses in my modest garden during a fairly hot British summer.

You can read a good screenplay with as much ease and pleasure as you read a novel, and the Fleabag scripts aren’t just good—they’re immaculate.

I pore over this book again and again, hoping that maybe this time I will see the trick, the moment of misdirection or sleight of hand that enables a story of profound personal pain—grief, loneliness, fear, they’re all here, all the big ones—to be so bloody funny. There is no trick, of course. There’s just flawless writing.

You should of course watch the TV show these scripts underpin, but do yourself a favour and read them too. Phoebe Waller-Bridge really did something here.

The Girls’ Guide to Hunting and Fishing doesn’t sound too promising in brief description.

Across seven distinct sections—short stories, effectively—it follows one Jane Rosenal from puberty to maturity as she attempts to navigate the world of romantic love. What makes it soar is the quality of Melissa Bank’s writing. The prose here is as smooth as a pane of glass. You pick the thing up and next time you blink, you’re on page 50.

It helps that Jane herself is a wonderfully witty creation, sometimes to her cost. As a reader, I clutch this book to my heart, sighing and smiling. As a writer, it makes me want to give up.