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 
delight 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. 
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.
Miranda 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 Ralph
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.
A 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.
I have A Little London Scandal in the TBR, having picked it up because of your review. I was just thinking yesterday that I want to get to it before the end of the year!
A nice easy Christmas read, maybe!
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.
You haven’t, but it sounds brilliant! Straight on the list. Thanks.
So good, a perfect winter warmer, and republished by Penguin Modern Classics.
That sounds spot on
Oh I really enjoyed Putney. So well written.
Wasn’t it? I don’t think I’ve seen anything else from her. Putney’s quite some time ago, now.
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.
I’ve enjoyed both and will be looking forward to the third!
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.
I’ve not come across that one (I’m sure I would have remembered given that title!) but I’ll look it up.
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)
Oh, that’s interesting – thanks. I hope you enjoy the ones you’ve ordered. The older I get the weepier I become particularly when watching films!
Good selections. Even though I’m an American who has never lived in UK [visited only] i read all kinds of books set there–London esp. I’ll likely read some of these in time.
Thank you. I’m the same about New York which I’ve visited just the once.
I’m drawn to V for Victory.
That’s an absolute treat of a book, Old Baggage, too.
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.
I so enjoyed both Old Baggage and V for Victory. I’m pretty sure I’ve spotted somewhere that there’s a new Lissa Evans in the offing for next year.
V for Victory is lovely, isn’t it? Just the right balance of humour and poignancy. A most enjoyable read!
It is, indeed. You might like to know that there’s a new Lissa Evans due in spring next year.