London Calling
Top 10 London Calling
: 84, Charing Cross Road, Bridget Jones's Diary, Pygmalion, About a Boy, David Copperfield, Possession, Brick Lane, Whose Body?, Little Dorrit, Saturday
| Author | Helene Hanff |
| ISBN | 0140143505 |
This charming classic, first published in 1970, brings together twenty years of correspondence between Helene Hanff, a freelance writer living in New York City, and a used-book dealer in London. Through the years, though never meeting and separated both geographically and culturally, they share...
Meet Bridget Jones—a 30-something Singleton who is certain she would have all the answers if she could:
a. lose 7 pounds
b. stop smoking
c. develop Inner Poise
"123 lbs. (how is it possible to put on 4 pounds in the middle of the night? Could flesh have somehow solidified becoming denser...
| Author | George Bernard Shaw |
| ISBN | 0486282228 |
One of George Bernard Shaw's best-known plays, Pygmalion was a rousing success on the London and New York stages, an entertaining motion picture and a great hit with its musical version, My Fair Lady. An updated and considerably revised version of the ancient Greek legend of Pygmalion and Galatea,...
| Author | Nick Hornby |
| ISBN | 0140285679 |
'How cool was Will Freeman?'
Too cool! At thirty-six, he's as hip as a teenager. He's single, child-free, goes to the right clubs and knows which trainers to wear. He's also found a great way to score with women: attend single parents' groups full of available (and grateful) mothers, all hoping...
David Copperfield is the story of a young man's adventures on his journey from an unhappy and impoverished childhood to the discovery of his vocation as a successful novelist. Among the gloriously vivid cast of characters he encounters are his tyrannical stepfather, Mr Murdstone; his brilliant,...
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0679735909 |
Possession is an exhilarating novel of wit and romance, at once an intellectual mystery and triumphant love story. It is the tale of a pair of young scholars researching the lives of two Victorian poets. As they uncover their letters, journals, and poems, and track their movements from London to Yorkshire—from...
| Author | Monica Ali |
| ISBN | 0743243315 |
A captivating read from a debut novelist, Brick Lane brings the immigrant milieu of East London to vibrant life. With great poignancy, Ali illuminates a foreign world; her well-developed characters pull readers along on a deeply psychological, almost spiritual journey. Through the eyes of two Bangladeshi...
| Author | Dorothy L. Sayers |
| ISBN | 0061043575 |
The stark naked body was lying in the tub. Not unusual for a proper bath, but highly irregular for murder -- especially with a pair of gold pince-nez deliberately perched before the sightless eyes. What's more, the face appeared to have been shaved after death. The police assumed that the victim was a...
| Author | Charles Dickens |
| ISBN | 0141439963 |
A novel of serendipity, of fortunes won and lost, and of the spectre of imprisonment that hangs over all aspects of Victorian society, Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit is edited with an introduction by Stephen Wall in Penguin Classics.
When Arthur Clennam returns to England after many years...
| Author | Ian McEwan |
| ISBN | 1400076196 |
Saturday is a masterful novel set within a single day in February 2003. Henry Perowne is a contented man — a successful neurosurgeon, happily married to a newspaper lawyer, and enjoying good relations with his children. Henry wakes to the comfort of his large home in central London on this, his day...
| Author | Joseph Conrad |
| ISBN | 0192801694 |
Mr Verloc, the secret agent, keeps a shop in London's Soho where he lives with his wife Winnie, her infirm mother, and her idiot brother, Stevie. When Verloc is reluctantly involved in an anarchist plot to blow up the Greenwich Observatory things go disastrously wrong, and what appears to be "a simple...
Keep the Aspidistra Flying
| Author | George Orwell |
| ISBN | 0141183721 |
London, 1936. Gordon Comstock has declared war on the money god; and Gordon is losing the war. Nearly 30 and "rather moth-eaten already," a poet whose one small book of verse has fallen "flatter than any pancake," Gordon has given up a "good" job and gone to work in a bookshop at half his former salary. Always...
A Far Cry from Kensington
| Author | Muriel Spark |
| ISBN | 0811214575 |
Set on the crazier fringes of 1950s literary London, A Far Cry from Kensington is a delight, hilariously portraying love, fraud, death, evil, and transformation. Mrs. Hawkins, the majestic narrator of A Far Cry from Kensington, takes us well in hand and leads us back to her threadbare years in postwar...
| Author | A.S. Byatt |
| ISBN | 0307272095 |
Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize
A spellbinding novel, at once sweeping and intimate, from the Booker Prize–winning author of Possession, that spans the Victorian era through the World War I years, and centers around a famous children’s book author and the passions, betrayals,...
| Author | Alan Hollinghurst |
| ISBN | 0739464469 |
In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, highly critical of her family's assumptions...
The Man Who Was Thursday: A Nightmare
| Author | G.K. Chesterton |
| ISBN | 0375757910 |
G. K. Chesterton's surreal masterpiece is a psychological thriller that centers on seven anarchists in turn-of-the-century London who call themselves by the names of the days of the week. Chesterton explores the meanings of their disguised identities in what is a fascinating mystery and, ultimately,...
| Author | Dorothy L. Sayers |
| ISBN | 0060809086 |
I'm sorry, Hercule Poirot. There's a new literary detective in my life, and while I will always cherish your silly Belgian antics, Lord Peter Wimsey just understands my needs better - he makes me laugh so much more than you do, and he has that sincerity that you lack.
Now don't cry, Hercule. It's...
| Author | Georgette Heyer |
| ISBN | 0099465647 |
Rich and handsome, darling of the ton, the hope of ambitious mothers and despair of his sisters, the Marquis of Alverstoke at seven-and-thirty sees no reason to put himself out for anyone. Until a distant connection, ignorant of his selfishness, applies to him for help. When Frederica Merriville brings...
| Author | Martin Amis |
| ISBN | 0099748614 |
Samson Young, first-person narrator of this Martin Amis novel, is a somewhat jaded, frequently sarcastic and acerbic 40-something intellectual literary writer from, not surprisingly, New York City. But his hard-edged Big Apple voice is absolutely pitch-perfect for the story he...
| Author | Patrick Hamilton |
| ISBN | 0099479168 |
Twenty Thousand Streets Under the Sky are the streets of London… And there people meet and part… And there they fall in love.
For he was in that mood when he loved all human creatures. He loved Ella because she was a good woman, and he loved the other because she was a bad woman. It was a good world.
In...
| Author | Norman Collins |
| ISBN | 0141442336 |
Also known as Dulcimer Street, Norman Collins's London Belongs to Me is a Dickensian romp through working-class London on the eve of the Second World War. This Penguin Modern Classics edition includes an introduction by Ed Glinert, author of The London Compendium.
It is 1938 and the prospect...
| Author | Anthony Trollope |
| ISBN | 1853262552 |
”There are a thousand little silly softnesses which are pretty and endearing between acknowledged lovers, with which no woman would like to dispense, to which even men who are in love submit sometimes with delight; but which in other circumstances would be vulgar,— and to the woman distasteful....
| Author | Alan Moore |
| ISBN | 0861661419 |
"I shall tell you where we are. We're in the most extreme and utter region of the human mind. A dim, subconscious underworld. A radiant abyss where men meet themselves. Hell, Netley. We're in Hell."
Having proved himself peerless in the arena of reinterpreting superheroes, Alan Moore turned...
| Author | Audrey Niffenegger |
| ISBN | 0224085611 |
Six years after the phenomenal success of The Time Traveler's Wife, Audrey Niffenegger has returned with a spectacularly compelling and haunting second novel set in and around Highgate Cemetery in London.
When Elspeth Noblin dies of cancer, she leaves her London apartment to her twin nieces,...
| Author | Elizabeth Bowen |
| ISBN | 0385720173 |
The Death of the Heart is perhaps Elizabeth Bowen's best-known book. As she deftly and delicately exposes the cruelty that lurks behind the polished surfaces of conventional society, Bowen reveals herself as a masterful novelist who combines a sense of humor with a devastating gift for divining human...
| Author | George Gissing |
| ISBN | 0140430326 |
In New Grub Street George Gissing re-created a microcosm of London's literary society as he had experienced it. His novel is at once a major social document and a story that draws us irresistibly into the twilit world of Edwin Reardon, a struggling novelist, and his friends and acquaintances in Grub...
| Author | Liza Picard |
| ISBN | 0312325665 |
This picture of the London of Queen Elizabeth (1558-1603) is the result of Liza Picard's curiosity about the practical details of daily life that almost every history book ignores. As seen in her two previous, highly acclaimed books-Restoration London and Dr. Johnson's London-she has immersed herself...
