Tag: London
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Ten Days, by Gillian Slovo
Hardback, Canongate, £14.99, out 3 March Martin Luther King said that “riots are the language of the unheard”. Developed from Slovo’s successful 2011 verbatim play The Riots at the Tricycle theatre, this readable novel offers multiple voices and a wholly convincing and gripping anatomy of how a London riot happens. It is a scorching summer,…
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London Fog: the Biography, by Christine L. Corton
Hardback, Harvard University Press, £22.95, out now This very readable history of London fog was a surprise hit this winter. Beautifully illustrated, with colour pictures well integrated into the text, Corton provides not only a good summary of why fogs happened and why they stopped but also gives an erudite account of how they affected…
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Disclaimer: Renee Knight
Disclaimer is yet another book being marketed with comparisons to Gone Girl on the cover. In fact, this clever debut set in London and Spain has its own distinctive style and deliciously sinister concept. When Catherine Ravenscroft and her husband downsize, she finds an unfamiliar book by her bedside just as she’s settling into a…
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Top 10 Fiction and Non-Fiction: August 2015
No surprise this month – Harper Lee is back, back, back. The holiday reading season has also revived several titles including The Girl on the Train, which benefited from a Radio 4 adaptation. Incidentally, Go Set a Watchman is not the only literary sequel in town: The Meursalt Investigation is an Algerian writer’s companion novel…
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A London Year
Paperback now available – £12.99 365 Days of City Life in Diaries, Journals and Letters – compiled by Travis Elborough & Nick Rennison “With Thelma to the George Inn, Southwark, for a lunch of steak-and-kidney pie, cherry pie and beer. Expected hordes of American tourists but found only English, including three young men with posh…
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London Hidden Interiors
Special Price: £35 THIS time last year we began excitedly exploring Panoramas of Lost London (still available at the special discount price of £25) and now we’re revelling in London Hidden Interiors. This sumptuous volume will appeal to anyone who loves London and feels a frisson of excitement at the idea of entering a hidden…
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London Architecture: Marianne Butler
Or 2000 years of architectural achievement in smart paperback format for £12.99. Metro Guides have been sending out their compact guides to all things London for quite some time now – cemeteries, gardens, hidden walks, bookshops, markets – seemingly aimed at tourists but perfect for Londoners too. Architecture, a past bestseller, has been recently reissued. …
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Panoramas of Lost London
Special Price: £25 The clue, of course, is in the title. In a similar vein to Lost London, Philip Davies has put together another coffee table tome packed with photographs from the London County Council archive. This, however, is more of a high definition model, with over 180 photos from the first book blown up…
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Londoners: Craig Taylor
Our favourite Canadian in London Craig Taylor has spent the last five years interviewing a massive ragtag army of Londoners, and this gorgeously produced, splendidly jacketed paperback is the glorious upshot of it all. The transcribed oral testimonies of cabbie, currency trader, dominatrix, street cleaner, beekeeper, commuter, squatter, property developer, barrister, hedge fund manager, market trader,…
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London Unfurled: Matteo Pericoli
Matteo Pericoli spent two years travelling along the Thames from Hammersmith Bridge to the [former] Millennium Dome and committing both sides of the riverbank to paper, and this is the result: two 37 foot long pen and ink drawings (a total of over 22 metres for the metrically minded), one for the north bank and…
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London’s Lost Rivers
Paul Talling, £9.99 The man behind Derelict London has been at it again, putting together another pocket sized tour to the bits of London you never knew existed; wet bits, to be specific – rivers, canals, ditches, brooks – long since drained, built over or otherwise consigned to the vagaries of history. A handsome little book…
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Derelict London
Paul Talling, £9.99 An alternative London that eschews the sights and locales we’re all familiar with in favour of the derelict and forgotten landmarks slowly rotting away in front of us.
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The London Compendium
Ed Glinert. £12.99 The tales of hidden London, area by area, street by street, building by building, comprehensively catalogued by a man that has walked them all; riots, murders, rock & roll, espionage, gangs, the lot.
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The London Cookbook
Jenny Linford, £14.99 Food writer Jenny Linford combines her own recipes with those of other food-loving Londoners -delicatessan owners, market stall owners, chefs and restaurateurs – in this celebration of London’s food culture.
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Brewer’s Dictionary of London Phrase and Fable
Russ Willey, £15.99 The essential London reference book you did not know you needed; a heady, witty and surprising mixture of the people , places, events, myths, anecdotes and slang.
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London Encyclopeadia
Ben Weinreb, £30 The most comprehensive book on London ever published, revised and updated with over 6000 entries and 500 drawings, prints and photographs covering all that is relevant to the city’s culture, economy, government and history. The definitive London reference work.
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50 Things to Spot in London
Usborne, £5.99 A pack of pocket-sized cards to help recognise and learn all about 50 of London’s famous landmarks. Each card has a detailed illustration, with information, facts and statistics on reverse.
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Lost London 1870-1945
Special Price: £19.99 A spectacular collection of more than 500 of the best images from the former London County Council archive of photographs, held by English Heritage for 25 years, but by no means a nostalgic lament for the city.