London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane.

It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. All human life is here – high-minded Hampstead and boozy Fitzrovia, the Jewish East End, intellectual Bloomsbury and Chinese Limehouse, Black London, Asian London, Irish London, Gay London...

Andrew Whitehead on The Nether World by George Gissing
Andrew Lane on The Sign of Four by Arthur Conan Doyle
Nadia Valman on Children of the Ghetto by Israel Zangwill
Angela V. John on Neighbours of Ours by Henry W. Nevinson
Sarah Wise on A Child of the Jago by Arthur Morrison
Anne Witchard on Limehouse Nights by Thomas Burke
Heather Reyes on Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf
Zoë Fairbairns on This Bed Thy Centre by Pamela Hansford Johnson
Rachel Lichtenstein on Jew Boy by Simon Blumenfeld
John King on May Day by John Sommerfield
John Lucas on Hangover Square by Patrick Hamilton
Susan Alice Fischer on Farewell Leicester Squareby Betty Miller
Jane Miller on The Heat of the Day by Elizabeth Bowen
Andy Croft on Rising Tide by Jack Lindsay
Bill Schwarz on The Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon
Jerry White on Absolute Beginners by Colin MacInnes
Cathi Unsworth on The L-Shaped Roomby Lynne Reid Banks
Ken Worpole on The Lowlife by Alexander Baron
Susie Thomas on The Buddha of Suburbiaby Hanif Kureishi
Gregory Woods on Ready to Catch Him Should He Fallby Neil Bartlett
Lisa Gee on White Teeth by Zadie Smith
Valentine Cunningham on The Hard Shoulderby Chris Petit
Courttia Newland on Dead Air by Iain Banks
Sanchita Islam on Brick Lane by Monica Ali
Jon Day on Capital by John Lanchester
Philippa Thomas on NW by Zadie Smith

Andrew Whitehead is the editor of BBC World Service News and an editor of History Workshop Journal. He is the author of A Mission in Kashmir and runs the website www.londonfictions.com

Jerry White teaches London History at Birkbeck, University of London. His books include London in the Twentieth Century: A City and Its People, which won the Wolfson History Prize in 2002.

The Open Door follows Saturday Night and Sunday Morning as the final volume in the Seaton series. Returning on a troopship from Malaya in 1949, Brian Seaton (Arthur's brother) comes back to a Nottingham world of rationing, the black market, a wife he no longer loves and a child who does not recognise him.

He is full of life and lust, but he has tuberculosis, forcing a long stay in a military hospital where he falls for first one nurse, then a second, while carrying on a relationship with another TB sufferer back in Nottingham.

In the background, this partially autobiographical novel reveals that Seaton is starting to write, meeting others like him as he realises there is a wider world than the back streets of his Midlands home.

Alan Sillitoe came to fame in 1958 with Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. His next book was The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner. Both were filmed and remain in print. After a long career as a novelist, playwright, poet and screen writer he died in 2010. Ruth Fainlight is a long established poet and translator, her Collected Poems came out in 2011.

In the spring of 1949, Jack Agass belatedly returns from the war to the working class street in Islington where he grew up. A proud, supportive community — with a pub and a barber shop, and a common love of The Arsenal. But the street has changed. Jack eventually finds his footing but he’s haunted by a yearning for his old childhood friend Rosie Hogarth, and for the pre-war security and certainties she represents. Rosie has moved out and up — living bohemian-style in Bloomsbury. He thinks she’s selling sex, but is he right?

A taut and very human drama is played out through the summer and autumn of the year. In his first London novel, Alexander Baron provides one of the most powerful and compassionate evocations of a working class community in the throes of profound change.

Alexander Baron wrote many novels and books of short stories, including the classic war novel From the City, >From the Plough and classic Hackney book of the 60s, The Lowlife (both recently republished by Black Spring). His novel King Dido is published by Five Leaves. By the 1960s he had become a regular writer on BBC’s Play for Today. He also wrote for drama serials like Poldark and A Horseman Riding By and wrote two Hollywood screenplays.
Rosie Hogarth is introduced by Andrew Whitehead, who works for the BBC World Service and is a former BBC political
and Indian correspondent.

1911, East London. The police collaborate with racketeers to keep an uneasy peace, periodically broken by vicious street wars. Dido Peach comes to prominence running protection rackets by breaking the unwritten rules of the underworld. His fall is just as spectacular, shaking even the callous and vicious world he lived in.

"Enthralling" - Sunday Times

"Alexander Baron was a skilled traditionalist, a contriver of plotdriven, socially perceptive meditations on place." - Iain Sinclair

Alexander Baron is a major writer of the past. His From the City, From the Plough was a classic of writing about WWII. The re-issue of his The Lowlife is currently on hold pending a film deal, the last publication of which was introduced by Iain Sinclair, long a champion of Alexander Baron’s work.

It is summer... a heat wave... tense uneasy days in the city. A classic of women's and dystopian writing

"A successful and upsetting novel" - Sunday Times

"Intelligent and energetic book... (which) works persuasively" - Observer

Colin Ward was an anarchist, a writer, an educator and an environmentalist. His books include Anarchy in Action and many others, primarily on social history, childhood, housing and the informal landscape. His wide-ranging interests included New Towns, allotments, transport and the British holiday camp. He was the founder-editor of Anarchy and the Bulletin of Environmental Education, and was for many years a contributing editor to Freedom.

Colin Ward made anarchism respectable, but not too respectable. His anarchism was pluralist and practical. It drew inspiration from writers of the past such as Kropotkin and Gustav Landauer but was firmly rooted in the present.

This booklet consists of tributes at his funeral and a memorial meeting from other writers, editors, family members and educators. These include Peter Hall, Ken Worpole, Peter Marshall, Dennis Hardy, Stuart White and Eileen Adams, and others.

A body is discovered: the terrible mutilations spell out the wounds of the Stigmata. For Glasgow DI Ray McBain, the killings are strangely familiar... and then the dreams begin.

The first in a series of books featuring DI Ray McBain, a Glasgow detective who has too many friends in the underworld for his own good, but enough to support him when he has to go on the run, the main suspect in a murder case.

Michael J Malone is already known in Scotland as a poet,
including for a residency in a sex shop. He works as a financial
advisor in Ayr. This is the first book of a planned series by an
author who has already worked the territory in preparation for
his first book. We expect a lot of attention and readings.

Nineteen Forty-eight is a comic verse-novel, audaciously rewriting George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four in Pushkin sonnets. Set during the 1948 London Olympics, it offers a radically alternative history of the Cold War, in which Britain has a Labour-Communist coalition government, the Royal Family have fled to Rhodesia and the US threatens to impose an economic blockade on Britain.

Featuring cartoons drawn especially for the book, Nineteen Forty-eight combines hard-boiled detective-novels and Pushkin sonnets, film-noir and Ealing comedy.

Andy Croft
Andy’s books include Red Letter Days, Out of the Old Earth, A Weapon in the Struggle, Selected Poems of Randall Swingler and Comrade Heart. He has written five novels and forty-two books for teenagers, mostly about football. He has edited many anthologies of poetry. His own collections include Ghost Writer, Sticky and Three Men on the Metro (with W.N. Herbert and Paul Summers). Nineteen Forty-eight is his second novel in Pushkin sonnets.

Martin Rowson
Martin is a multi award-winning cartoonist whose work appears regularly in The Guardian, The Independent on Sunday, The Daily Mirror, The Morning Star, Tribune and many other publications. His books include graphic adaptations of T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy and a forthcoming updated version of Gulliver's Travels. Among his other books are The Limerickiad, The Dog Allusion, and Fuck and Stuff, a memoir of his late parents which was long-listed for the 2007 Samuel Johnson Prize.

In 1849 several hundred thousand Europeans and Americans trekked across the country for the gold fields of California - the Gold Rush being a defining moment in that country’s short history.

John Clark followed the same historic roads and trails, retracing that journey through history. His travels took him through violent ghettos and even more violent hurricanes, desert sandstorms and blazing heat - cycling in areas where no sane person would choose to cycle. Along the way John Clark meets crazed war veterans, failing farmers, unemployed Mexican migrants, the washed up and those left over from the American Dream which the Gold Rush had done so much to form. His journey also took him through the wildest, the most beautiful and remotest parts of America.

"Travel books can easily degenerate into egocentric self-portraits... John knows his craft better than that. Indeed, it's hard to open the book at a random page without being plunged into some vivid and revealing conversation John's had on tour, be it with some extreme, ironic character or simply a couple of unassuming, hospitable family folks. A competent, well crafted book... readers will learn a lot from this exploration of a country."
Velovision

John Stuart Clark is a travel writer and cycling journalist as well as a cartoonist specialising in development issues. His credits include:

Travel writing: Daily Telegraph, Travel Africa, TGO, Traveler’s Europe

Cycling: Cycling Plus, Bicycle, Cycle and all major high street and specialist cycling magazines.

Comic strips: Time Out, Independent, Economist, Al Jazeera, New Internationalist, Times supplements... as well as creating and illustrating the international mass circulation development comics produced by UNICEF.

Jack Kiley, a professional footballer turned private investigator, is hired to track down a solider who has gone missing while on leave from Iraq. The soldier's mind is disturbed by what he has seen and done in the war, and he is armed. There are fears both for the man himself and for the safety of his estranged wife and two young children.

Kiley's search leads him to Nottingham, where he teams up with D. I. Charlie Resnick. Together they search the house where the soldier's wife and children have been living and find them gone, almost certainly taken against their will ... the only question now is, will they find them before it is too late?

Trouble in Mind brings together two of John Harvey’s major characters.

"No one in Britain is writing better crime fiction" - The Times

"One of the masters of British crime fiction" - Sunday Telegraph

"One of the leading writers of crime fiction alive today" - Le Monde

"A little gem of a book: it's a bit longer than a short story, and a bit shorter than a novella. Harvey is a wonderful writer. It's about a detective and a cop trying to find a soldier absent without leave from Iraq. It made me green with envy: it made me wonder if I over-write everything." - Mark Billingham, Sky Books Programme

John Harvey is the author of ten Charlie Resnick novels, the first of which, Lonely Hearts, was named by The Times (London) as one of the 100 Best Crime Novels of the Century.

In 2007 he was awarded the British Crime Writers' Association Cartier Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing for his title Flesh and Blood.

Farah Jafari needs sanctuary, but now she is dead. A man is in custody and soon the case will be closed. DC Tina Barraclough works with refugees like Farah and the man under arrest and she knows there is something wrong with the official version. She is off the case, but needs to find out what really happened. What price is she prepared to pay?

Danuta Reah (also publishing as Carla Banks) is the author of nine previous crime books. She is an active member of the Crime Writers Association. She writes for English and Media and lives in Sheffield.

Reviews of her previous books include:

"A powerful psychological thriller" – Daily Mail,

"Scary Stuff" – Literary Review,

"Splendid - evokes an air of menace" – Daily Mail.

Enthusiasts call Harry Gysel a psychic. To others he is a fraud, a meddler in the occult. When he appears to predict the death of a woman in the audience of one of his shows and that woman is subsequently found murdered, Harry becomes an instant celebrity. But Chief Inspector Morgan isn’t so easily convinced.

"You’ve come here to find the truth", says Harry Gysel to the audience, but the truth is not so easy to find…

Rod Duncan is the author of a trilogy of novels based around a fictional riot in contemporary inner-city Leicester. Backlash, Breakbeat and Burnout.

Backlash was shortlisted for the John Creasey award for the best debut crime novel of the year.

Praise for Rod Duncan's previous trilogy:

"Sheer page-turning compulsion" - Martyn Waites

"(this) pacy tale of life in the inner city shows that modern British crime fiction is alive and kicking over the traces" - Birmingham Post

"A thriller which has the reader gripped from the opening" - Leicester Mercury

"Separate but interlinked stories are played out where good and bad are never clearly defined and each chapter ends on a cliffhanger urging you to read on." - Big Issue

A frightened phone call from her young daughter sends Jenny Carter into the darkness of Quarry Woods, seventeen years after she swore she’d never return. What she finds there triggers a journey back to a horrific event in her own childhood – an event which now threatens the present.

Clare Littleford is the author of two previous crime novels. She is the crime reviewer of the Yorkshire Post.

Jack deals in cardboard, selling expensive and rare gaming cards to rich collectors. He makes plenty of money, travelling the world. He meets millionaire Henri, the man who has everything. Well, almost everything. Henri wants the elusive Okinawa Dragon, a one-off card given to a Japanese businessman who refuses to sell. A plan is hatched, and Jack is soon on his way to Osaka to complete Henri’s collection. There is only one way to get hold of something somebody doesn’t want to give.

Praise for Nicola Monaghan’s The Killing Jar:

"An exuberant debut that reaches the parts of Britain mainstream fiction usually leaves alone." - The Independent

"Direct and deceptively simple. In spite of the suffering there are surprising touches of humour and tenderness that bloom like flowers on asphalt." - The Times

"...often violent, it isn't gratuitous, and Kerrie-Ann's strident voice sounds authentic; her plight compelling and affecting."
- Independent on Sunday


"Utterly compelling reading about a 'dead stormy'" - coming of age Booklist (starred review)


"startling and potent debut novel. Powerful and complex."
- The Independent

GCSEs are over and Chris and his mates are heading to the south coast for their first lads’ holiday. Their parents don’t know they’ve gone, but they’re not worried. What could possibly go wrong on a trip to the seaside? Even a run-in with some local lads who don’t like out of towners can’t spoil the anticipation. Things start well when they meet the girls. The sun comes out and Chris thinks his luck might be in with Steph. But Whitbourne’s a small place when you’ve pissed off the local hard cases…

Out of Towners delivers another dose of Dan Tunstall’s tough, funny, page-turning fiction.

"Brilliantly captures teenage life" – LoveReading

"For once the words 'gritty' and 'real' are not wasted" – Armadillo

"Original, well-written and hugely thought-provoking" – WriteAway

Dan Tunstall lives in Leicester where he is now a full time writer. His
previous jobs range from school teaching to market trader. He is now
regularly visiting schools, often with Bali Rai.

Dan Tunstall's Big and Clever was shortlisted for the 2010 Branford
Boase Award - the major award for first novels for children

You wouldn’t mess with Mel. She doesn't care about much, but when things go wrong at home, she cares. She has to find out what’s going on. It’s not a choice. And when she finds out, everything in her life falls apart. And everything has to change.

Closer is a difficult story that needs to be told, a story about what happens when a dad gets too close. But most of all, it’s a story about Mel – funny, outrageous, emotional, brave. You won’t forget her.

Maxine Linnell's first novel, Vintage, was published by Five
Leaves last year and was chosen for promotion by LoveReading.
She is a psychotherapist in practice in Leicester, which has been
her home since 2000.

Holly and Marilyn are both 16. Holly is dissatisfied with life. She hangs round with her gay best friend Kyle and tries to avoid her mother as much as possible. Meanwhile Marilyn sleeps in rollers and dresses like her mother and does what she is told. Holly fancies the guy who has just moved in opposite, but Marilyn is not sure about sex at all. Holly lives in 2009, Marilyn lives in 1962 – the same house. Just suppose they swapped places...

A fresh and funny début novel about freedom, expectations and how, just maybe, you can be what you want to be

Maxine Linnell trained as a psychotherapist and later gained at distinction in the Nottingham Trent University MA in Creative Writing. She lives in Leicester where she chairs Leicester Writers Club, an organisation of published writers.

Tom’s whole life is straight out of CrapTowns. Mum died. Dad’s a waster. School is tough.

Tom and Raks are at the bottom of the pecking order - and it just shouldn’t be that way - but then they befriend ‘ASBO boy’, Ryan, and go to a Letchford Town football game with him.

When it kicks off outside the ground with the Castleton fans, Tom and Raks are ready and up for it - it ain’t football - but Tom is hooked and can’t wait for the next home game!

Suddenly everyone at school notices Tom and Raks: they have an identity, they have power — but at what cost?

"...Ten times better than the usual teenage crap. It's about the lifestyle that wannabes like The Streets and Guy Ritchie can only dream about." - Bali Rai

Dan Tunstall has worked as a gardener, in marketing and in teaching. He lives in Leicester and is a season ticket holder for Leicester City FC.

Aazim is fifteen. His family is about to be deported. When Immigration come for them, he decides to hide in a city allotment. But nowhere is safe for long. Aazim meets Nadimah. People are after her, too. Soon, the pair have to go on the run and they have to find work. Their new country is full of secret gardens. Few of them are safe places. Will they find a way to stay?

David Belbin is the author of more than forty books for young adults, those for reluctant readers include China Girl and Stray. His other titles include Denial, Festival and, from Five Leaves, Love Lessons and Dead Teachers Don't Talk. He has written a series of crime fiction books for Tindall Street Press, and an adult novel, The Pretender, for Five Leaves. He runs the Creative Writing MA programme at Nottingham Trent University.

Four days after Nick Harman’s seventh birthday, his father climbed onto a bridge high above four lanes of traffic, paused, then threw himself to his death on the road below. That was a little over nine years ago. Today Nick was sixteen. The clock alongside his bed read 7:59.

Nick lives with his mother on a tough housing estate in north London. On his sixteenth birthday, his mother gives him a box of things left by his father all those years ago. The contents lead Nick to try and discover what led his father from being a successful blues singer to the point where he took his own life.

Against a background of shifting allegiances, involving both the violent gangs on the estate and his first serious involvement with a girl, Nick is forced to come to terms, not only with who his father was but who he is himself.

“A fine novel about growing up by one of the masters of British crime fiction.” - Le Monde

John Harvey has written many books of crime fiction and won the Crime Writers' Association Diamond Dagger for Sustained Excellence in Crime Writing. You can read more about him on www.mellotone.co.uk.

Mark Trace shows a remarkable talent for literary forgery. A gap year in Paris sees his skill exploited by a manuscript dealer. Mark fetches up in London, working at one of the UK's oldest literary magazines. That's when the trouble really starts. Hemingway and Graham Greene are only the beginning. What starts as a prank soon becomes deadly serious. In this literary thriller David Belbin writes about originality, desire and literary ambition, in the voice of a character with the capacity to deceive everyone, including himself.

David Belbin is the author of more than thirty novels for young adults, including Denial and Festival. His short stories for adults have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies. He runs the MA in Creative Writing at Nottingham Trent University. He currently edits the Crime Express series for Five Leaves.