Five More Novels Set in London

This is my second post featuring novels I’ve enjoyed set in London, a city I’ve visited almost every year of my adult life but still find places I’ve not seen before to Cover image for V for Victory by Lissa Evansdelight me as I discovered on my first post-lockdown holiday. It’s a city of many different faces some of which you’ll find in my choices. Below are five novels firmly anchored in the capital, some at different and sometimes troubled times in its life, all with links to reviews on this blog.

Lissa Evans’ V for Victory is set in the last days of the Second World War against a backdrop of a London heavily scarred with bombsites. It catches up with Vee and Noel, names familiar to readers of Old Baggage, neither of whom are quite who they appear to be. Vee is now running a guest house open to lodgers willing to tutor the precocious Noel who refuses to go to school. To their guests they’re aunt and nephew but Vee is Noel’s guardian, met in compromising circumstances. The novel draws to a close on VE Day, the capital joyfully partying on its streets, by which time Vee will have made a surprising ally and Noel will have understood a great deal about his origins. Evans’ hugely entertaining novel is steeped in wartime London atmosphere. Cover image for Ridley Road by Jo Bloom

Fast forward to 1962 and the glossy vibrant Swinging Sixties – all Carnaby Street, mini-skirts, coffee bars and rock n’ roll, or at least that’s what nostalgic TV documentaries would have us believe. Jo Bloom’s Ridley Road flips that coin to reveal something nasty – racism and fascism alive and kicking almost two decades after the war ended. Inspired by a conversation heard between her father and an old political activist friend, Bloom’s novel follows twenty-year-old Vivien who leaves Manchester, heading south in search of the man she knows as Jack Fox, a writer who spent time closeted with her father just before he died. What follows is an exploration of a fascinating slice of British history all wrapped up in a thriller and a love story. It’s a chilling read at times which sounds a warning bell, loud and clear for our own times.

Cover image for A Little London Scandal by Miranda EmmersonMiranda Emmerson’s A Little London Scandal is also set in the ‘60s, on the eve of the decriminalisation of homosexuality in England and Wales. When a body is found at the back of a gentleman’s club an investigation is launched by a CID keen for a conviction and not too fussy about evidence. Anna Treadway resumes her role as amateur sleuth when a young man she knows finds himself in the frame, teaming up with DS Hayes in a quest for truth which takes them through all echelons of London’s society, from the establishment to the homeless. One of the things I most enjoyed about this atmospheric novel was its vivid sense of place which took me to a part of London I know well, long before gentrification.

Sonia Zinovieff’s Putney offers glimpses of ‘70s bohemian London as it explores the fallout of childhood abuse through RalphCover image who’s aroused by Daphne’s boyish beauty when she’s nine and he’s twenty-seven. Daphne is the child of parents caught up in their own affairs, looking anywhere but at what’s happening under their noses. Forty years later, Ralph is oblivious to Daphne’s chaotic, rackety life while she works on a collage commemorating her time with him in a flat a stone’s throw away from her childhood home. This subject could so easily have been mishandled but Zinovieff explores it with consummate skill in a thoroughly accomplished novel.

Cover image for Victoria Park by Gemma ReevesA much more positive view of human nature can be found in Gemma Reeves’ Victoria Park, an evocative portrait of a London neighbourhood which follows the intersecting lives of its inhabitants over a year that’s mundane for some, dramatic for others. Like any neighbourhood, Victoria Park is not without its troubles – a young man, terribly injured by an acid attack, lies in a coma – nor has it escaped the relentless rise of property prices. As the year wears on, an affair will be ended, a body will be found, a wedding will be celebrated, a baby conceived and an ageing resident will continue to lose her grip on the present. Beautifully executed, Reeves’ absorbing enjoyable novel is imbued with gentle humour, compassion and affection.

Any novels set in London you’d like to share?

If you’d like to explore more posts like this, I’ve listed them here. My first five London novels are here.

24 thoughts on “Five More Novels Set in London”

  1. If I haven’t already mentioned it, Norman Collins’s London Belongs to Me is wonderful—a Dickensian heir set during the Phony War and Peace of 1940, following the inhabitants of a boarding house through professional success and failure, political protest, murder, love and loss. An absolute corker.

  2. Delighted to see V For Victory and Putney in here. I’m writing my third London-set novel (the other two being A Vicious Circle and Hearts and Minds) right now, so it’s good to be reminded of the rest.

  3. Ridley Road and A Little London Scandal look very interesting. Somehow putting me in the mind of The Misinterpretation of Tara Jupp which I think also partly unfolds in London.

  4. Tara Jupp is on Open Library.As a Londoner love books about that city so have ordered three of these from h library.Recently bought London belongs to Me..read as a teenager..now I’m 76..will be interesting to see how much it still resonates!(I migrated from London aged 11 so any read bound to be a bit weepy..yes,still)

  5. There are so many books set in London aren’t there. I really enjoyed reading V for Victory. I actually like like novels set in the London of the 1930s/40s – even more so if they were written then too. I am less drawn to novels of modern London.

  6. Jane Eleanor Davis

    A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers by Xiaolu Guo
    A Distant Shore by Caryl Phillips
     A Parcel for Anna Browne by Miranda Dickinson
    A Week in December by Sebastian Faulks
    About a Boy by Nick Hornby
    Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes
    Adrift in Soho by Colin Wilson
    Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
    An Equal Music by Vikram Seth
    Atonement by Ian McEwan
    Belgravia by Julian Fellowes
    Brick Lane by Monica Ali
    Bridget Jones’s Diary by Helen Fielding
    Brixton Rock by Alex Wheatle
    Capital by John Lanchester
    City of the Mind by Penelope Lively
    Curtain Call by Anthony Quinn
    Damage by Josephine Hart
    Erotic Stories for Punjabi Widows by Balli Kaur Jaswal
    Evelina by Frances Burney
    First Love by Gwendoline Riley
    Expectation by Anna Hope – Superb!
    Smash all the Windows by Jane Davis
    My Counterfeit Self by Jane Davis
    An unchoreographed Life by Jane Davis
    Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
    Hearts and Minds by Amanda Craig
    Her by Harriet Lane
    Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger
    Honour by Elif Shafak
    House of Cards by Michael Dobbs
    King Solomon’s Carpet by Barbara Vine and Ruth Rendell
    Life After Life by Kate Atkinson
    London Belongs to Me by Norman Collins
    London Fields by Martin Amis
    London: The Novel by Edward Rutherford
    Mother London by Michael Moorcock
    Mr Loverman by Bernadine Evaristo
    Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
    My Best Friend’s Girl by Dorothy Kroomson
    Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
    Notes on a Scandal by Zoe Heller
    Not Working by Lisa Owens
    Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
    One Day by David Nicholls
    Ordinary Thunderstorms by William Boyd
    White Teeth by Zadie Smith
    We Are All Made of Glue by Marina Lewycka
    Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
    Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackery
    Their Finest Hour and a Half by Lissa Evans
    The Way We Live Now by Anthony Trollope
    The Swimming Pool Library by Alan Hollinghurst
    The Secret Agent by Joseph Conrad
    The Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie
    The Road Home by Rose Tremain
    The Report by Jessica Francis Kane
    The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
    The Opposite House by Helen Oyeyemi
    The Other Boleyn Girl by Philippa Gregory
    The Night Watch by Sarah Waters
    The Mimic Men by V. S. Naipaul
    The Long Firm by Jake Arnott
    The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
    The L Shaped Room by Lynne Reid Banks
    The Innocents by Francesca Segal
    The Impressionist by Hari Kunzru
    The Hand that First Held Mine by Maggie O’Farrell
    The End of the Affair by Graham Greene
    The Crimson Petal and the White by Michael Faber
    The Colour of Memory by Geoff Dyer

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