Laura Barnett’s new novel, Births, Deaths & Marriages, follows a group of university friends as they reunite the year they’re all turning 40. It’s a love letter to London – a place close to Laura’s heart – so, to celebrate its publication, Laura has shared with us her top favourite books set in the UK’s capital.
I’m a Londoner born and bred. I was born, in fact, in St Thomas’s Hospital, in a ward overlooking the river Thames and the Houses of Parliament – you can’t get much more London-bred than that. And though I may no longer live in London – I left for rural Kent in 2020 – the city is still very close my heart, as reflected in my latest novel Births, Deaths and Marriages, which features a number of London locations, and is something of a love letter to the capital.
So coming up with my top London-set novels for this list was no easy task – there are just so many to choose from! – but here they are, together with the areas of London they depict, and a few thoughts on my personal connections with each one.
Having spent a decade living in Crystal Palace in South-East London, I was delighted to discover the nearby suburb of Beckenham immortalised in the pages of Clare Chambers’ charming 2020 novel.
The area is famously associated with David Bowie, who lived here for a time, but Chambers’s characters are not living such glamorous lives, and this quiet, leafy backwater on the border of Kent and London feels like the ideal setting for her tale of repressed emotion and potentially miraculous happenings.
I’ve long been a fan of Diana Evans’ muscular, lyrical writing and insightful characterisation, and as a long-time Crystal Palace resident I rushed out to buy her 2018 novel, which is set there and in neighbouring Sydenham, on the day of publication.
It didn’t disappoint: I was soon completely absorbed in this clever, wry, immersive depiction of two restless couples, and I loved spotting local landmarks – like the ruins of the old Crystal Palace itself, which burned to the ground in the 1930s – in Evans’ story.
Strictly speaking, this is a collection of stories rather than a novel, but I had to include it as this book had such a significant effect on me when I first read it as a teenager. I came to it, I think, though the song of the same name by the band Squeeze – as a girl from Clapham myself, the opening lyric “I never thought it would happen / with me and the girl from Clapham” has always amused me.
When I learned that there was a book with the same title as the song, I borrowed it from my local library and thrilled to Dunn’s depiction of the industrial, working-class areas of Battersea and Clapham Junction in the 1960s, full of larger-than-life female characters and shot through with the vernacular of the time.
After university, I moved north of the river and spent my twenties living in the exotic (to me!) areas of Kentish Town, Highgate and Newington Green. It was during this time that I came across Craig’s shimmering 2009 London novel, which follows five characters in and around north London.
Craig’s subjects are hard-hitting – illegal immigration, racism and sex trafficking, to name but a few – but her ability to enter the, well, hearts and minds of each of her diverse characters is astonishing.
Tessa Hadley is, to my mind, probably the best writer in English working today, and I get very excited about the publication of each of her novels, many of which are set at least partly in London.
Free Love, published in 2022, takes place mainly in and around Ladbroke Grove in the late 1960s, when the area was the epicentre of a particular section of the counterculture. I spent a lot of time there in the nineties – I went to school in west London, and I often used to schlep across town to meet friends at Portobello Road at the weekend – and it still hadn’t lost that cool, burnished sheen.
Hadley is an amazing observer of emotional nuance, but her geographical descriptions are also brilliantly precise, and she evokes this particular place and time with laser-sharp acuity.
