Recommendations
North London, and our corner of it especially, has long been blessed as a haven for writers, artists and actors.
Here are a few of the luminaries we are lucky enough to share a postcode with... with some of our favourites reviewed; and if we've made any particularly glaring omissions—or you'd like to recommend a neighbour... then please email us via the usual channel and we'd be glad to set the record straight.
Local Heros (...in no particular order!)
| Doris Lessing Gillian Slovo Jacqueline Rose Kate Summerscale Michael Simkins Linda Grant Bernard Kops Benjamin Markovits David Aaronovitch Dr Bernard Barnett |
Stuart Hall Lauren Child Anthony McGowan Robert Hudson Fay Weldon Margaret Drabble Sigmund Freud Alan Moorehead George Orwell Adam Phillips Nomi Sharron |
And, as a footnote, we've added a review or two of our locally-set favourite fiction. As ever, you'll find all of these fine authors/books on our shelves... or, at a pinch, available via a 24 hour order.
Keep the Aspidistra Flying / George Orwell / Penguin / £8.99 / 9780141183725
Set in Hampstead and written when Orwell was also living there and working at Booklovers' Corner on Pond Street, this is his satire of the lower middle classes as well as a harrowing account of poverty, a subject which he has explored more than once.
In our humble opinion, this has to be one of Orwell's most underated novels: a little gem just waiting to be discovered by those who seldom venture beyond Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
The Psychopathology of Everyday Life / Sigmund Freud / Penguin / £9.99 / 9780141184036
Freud's London home in Maresfield Gardens, near Finchley Road tube station, contains the world-famous couch on which psychoanalysis was born, though he was in Hampstead only at the very end of his life.
One of his most entertaining works, the Psychopathology, seems equally relevant to London society in the 21st century as it was to the repressed citizens of his spiritual home Vienna.
Everyday accounts of confused memories, words and actions add up to a book of laughter and forgetting for our times. Last one to leave, please change the lightbulb, but only if it really wants to change...
The Fifth Child / Doris Lessing /
Harper Perennial / £7.99 / 9780586089033
‘Would people always refuse to see him, to recognise what he was?’
Ben was born in 1975, to David and Harriet Lovatt. Many would say he should not have been born at all.
In the sexual climate of the 60s, this couple was considered oddball, just wanting a monogamous relationship with a big house and a big family. This all came to pass with four wonderful children and 'happiness, in the old style' filling the house along with the 'smell of fresh baked bread' and glorious family get-togethers. As this is a horror story, the inevitable fall is on the cards from the beginning, and even if it does not involve monsters as such, the old dark house definitely comes into play.
Harriet refers to her sister's little girl as a mongol (knowing that the term is outdated) and thinking it is the quarelling between the parents that may be the cause. From this point, a dissection of society's decline and judgements runs through the veins of the story of a boy who is different. Civilisation would rather lock up and forget about this block in the way of a normal and happy family.
Set between the 60s and 80s, England is seen as a place that becomes a fortress where people would rather stay indoors than face what's out there. The family is torn apart due to the freak in the house whose violent episodes escalate in line with his frustrations. And so the 'help' given by those surrounding the dilemma becomes the backbone and illuminates the best elements of the book; such as the freedom and magnetism to the wilderness felt by children that creates fear within adults.
For all the ways in which Ben is treated by others, the question comes back to the mother, as she is judged and labelled; when can you let go of a child ? Even when your child is considered a monster.
A thought provoking and no nonsense novel, taking nature versus nuture into the psychological depths of pregnancy stage morality and influence.
The Suspicions of Mr Whicher / Kate Summerscale / Bloomsbury / £7.99 / 9780747596486
One of the younger generation of NW6 writers, Kate Summerscale quite deservedly won the 2008 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction for this gem of a book: a meticulously researched and utterly gripping account of the detective work surrounding a cause celebre in Victorian Britain: the case of the murder of a three year old boy.
The amount of detail Summerscale amasses is extraordinary and through her own detective work, the reader is transported to the very beginning of modern detective work and detective writing, the bizarre concerns of the Victorian tabloid reader and society in general, and also the background, motivations and modus operandi of the eponymous detective.
With all the ingredients of a classic detective yarn: the isolated Victorian country house, mounting and supressed family tensions, the trail of clues and possible red herrings, Suspicions is all the more fascinating for being true and quite clearly being a landmark case in the hisotry of detective work and also an inspiration to the thriller writers that followed shortly afterwards.
If you haven't read it yet, do yourself a favour and pop in to West End Lane Books and get one. Highly recommended both for literary detective fiction fans and also anyone interested in social and media history.
Unsafe Attachments / Caroline Oulton / Windmill Books / £7.99 / 9780099519843
This is a locally set book by one of West Hampstead's newest authors, Caroline Oulton...and, forget six degrees of separation, the characters in Oulton's debut collection of short stories, set among the sexually mobile North London middle classes, slip seamlessly in and out of one another's beds and lives. And this is a seductive device that draws the reader in to the protagonists' lives as they break up, make up and make love and war.
Recounted with wit, zest and affection, one could easily imagine these characters and their complicated domestic arrangements making the move to the small screen, but before they do, this slim volume is just the thing for your hand luggage this summer,
Locally Set New Book: War Damage / Elizabeth Wilson / Serpent's Tail / £9.99 / 9781846686504
Set in the drab aftermath of World War Two, Wilson's story centres on the would-be literary salon of Regine Milne, who, like moat of the other main protagonists, is still living in the shadow of the war and the many misdeeds she hopes are long buried.
Regine harbours delusions of herself as the muse of the flayboyant, influential and, necessarily for the times, closeted homosexual Freddie Buckingham, and when he turns up murdered on Hampstead Heath immediately after one of regine's soirees, she and her circle immediately fall under suspicion.
Beautifully pitched and tightly plotted, War Damages is all the more fabulous for being chock full of local references and quite brilliantly paints a picture of post war privations and passions
