fiction

Smashing idea, this: a double compendium of 33 short stories, each based on a London Borough. The collection is split across two volumes, which ignore the Thames as usual-divider and instead split the capital into East and West moieties. The result is a hotchpotch of …

Chris Paling, novelist, has worked in our city for 30 years. The capital is the setting of two of his novels, including the latest, Nimrod’s Shadow, published this month. And yet, he says, “I don’t know London very well.” The city is “a place I …

Remember the Star Trek holodeck, where off duty officers could slip into a Sherlock Holmes adventure or visit a Klingon brothel (only for the whole thing to turn evil…every time)? Well how far are we from such things? A long way, probably. But that’s not …

A debut novelist tackles the hurt and the horror of gang life on a London housing estate. From the opening paragraphs, you know this isn’t going to be the jubilant tale of childhood merriment suggested by the title. Playground begins with protagonist Jonah speaking from …

Here are some we read earlier… Few places on Earth have been fictionalised as much as London – from the bawdy Georgian novels of Defoe through the classic Victorian romps of Dickens, Stevenson, Gissing and Conan Doyle, to 20th Century landmarks from Woolf, Orwell, Ballard, …

Winterson’s latest children’s book is a portrait of seventeenth century London. The tale of Jack Snap’s misadventures battling the Magus, a megalomaniac alchemist, brings the city to brawling, stinking life. Young Jack is about to become a printer’s apprentice on the Strand until he is …

“The Central line draws an invisible line across London”, says Sarah Butler, “connecting east to west, rising up like the edges of a smile”. Well, you certainly couldn’t tell by riding the thing through rush-hour London, where faces burrowed into newspapers and white cords trailing …

Photo by hey mr glen Thanks to reader Ben Henley who brought to our attention Minor Delays: an entertaining and savagely ambitious project by writer Holly Gramazio, in which she is writing a short story named after every Tube and DLR station, in alphabetical order. …

Image courtesy of Annie Mole under the Creative Commons license In the next seven days: six Czech poets, five Yeats devotees, four more poets (but of eight minds), three ace events from the London Word Festival crew, two Shakespeare-inspired outings, and one under-the-radar reading from …

Image courtesy of an untrained eye under the Creative Commons license A happy confluence of events this week – the launch of the London Word Festival and a bibliophile’s international holiday – and the book grocer’s finally risen from her seasonal slumber. Wintry weather or …