84 Books Like Gobbelino London & a Collision of Catastrophes

Actually, it is ten books, covering 1855 to 1897 (with a reconstruction of the missing journals of April 1858 to May 1862 – their disappearance being the cause of countless conspiracy theories!). These diaries are the principal source of practically every piece of Lewis Carroll/Alice analysis that has ever been published, and provide a uniquely revealing chronology of the genesis of one of the world’s classic works of literature. These volumes mean that the enigmatic genius of Lewis Carroll is not the sole preserve of academics or historians; through them, he becomes accessible to us all. Transcribed and fully indexed by Edward Wakeling, a renowned world expert, whose extraordinarily detailed and insightful bibliographical and contextual notes provide an unparalleled insight into Victorian Oxford (London, Surrey, Yorkshire, Sussex, and more).

Some of these volumes are hard to get, but there are some remaining copies at the Lewis Carroll Society if interested. 

I was born in a fishing village in Yorkshire and although I live in the city now, I always feel the pull of the sea. This book is a memoir set in Orkney and London. It is about the writer’s struggle with addiction and her recovery – partly through reconnecting to the natural landscape again. Amy’s prose is clean and bright. She constructs sentences with no fat on them. Her descriptions are sharply accurate. I really related to her need to get away from London to find her way back to health. London life is intense and although I love it here, it is a constantly demanding city. Reading this novel reinforced my desire to look at things closely, notice them anew, and to remember to go and visit the sea, whenever I can. 

This modern gothic follows Ivy Radcliffe as she suddenly inherits an estate house in England, during the tail end of World War I.

Throughout this story grief is explored very intimately through Ivy mourning the loss of her brother to the war, but also the way that the communal grief of the war affects individuals and shapes English society and how it functions.

Without giving away too many spoilers, memory places a huge, multilayered role in the story, and of course we see the way that grief and memory are connected, both through the way Ivy remembers her lost brother and characters mourning the way life once was before the war and, ultimately, will never be again.

This is a gorgeous book to be savoured slowly.

It is suffused with music throughout (and the nerd within me loves the reoccurring literary motifs and phrases that definitely lend a musical quality to the book) and took me back to lazy summer days as a teenager when I first moved to London and the city felt wide open with excitement and possibility.

This is another love story, but one about community, family and the first loves that we learn from our parents.

The Alex Versus series's world-building, magic, and plots are very complex and layered. This is some seriously well thought out urban fantasy. 

The main character, Alex, is basically an instant seer, able to see multiple consequences of diving left versus right, shooting someone, running, etc. He doesn’t always have time to evaluate his choices before having to make a decision. And often, there’s no out without loss or a high price to be paid. 

The back story is cleverly woven into the plot and is never boring. This series has one of my favorite side characters ever written—an arachnid with startling insight and wisdom. 

Dominic wrote two very good crime books in a short series before publishing Vine Street.

I am including Vine Street on my list because, although it’s set in London and is therefore not ‘regional’, it was one of the great crime novels of 2021-22 and deserves to become a classic. I read this book before it was published, and I knew, like everyone else, that it was something special.

The story spans almost a century, from the seedy streets of London’s Soho in the 1930s, until the present day. There are some really well-researched and vividly depicted descriptions of police investigations in the 30s, and just for that it’s worth a read. But there’s also a twisting, mesmerizing plot that takes us all the way to the present.

What really distinguishes Vine Street, though, is the writing itself, which seems to echo the rhythms of the 1930s jazz clubs, and… show more.

This novel perfectly captures the frenetic pleasure-seeking ethos of the youth of the English upper classes after the horrors of WW1- unsurpsingly, as it is written by one of them.

Evelyn Waugh was one of the Bright Young People, as they became known, who tore round London in sports cars, snatching at policemen’s helmets for the treasure hunts they loved.

I had a ‘property tycoons’ itch that I needed to scratch, and this book by Rosa Lucas was exactly what I needed.

I adored this enemies to lovers high stakes romance, and the witty heroine was someone I was rooting for from the very instant I met her. With a dash of CEO/employee and a whole host of fire, this book needs to be on your ereader.

This is an obvious follow-on from my first choice, a gritty fictionalised version of the kind of world the Kray Brothers moved in. It features the gangster Harry Starks, who is both a porn king and a sociology graduate, and has one of those great openings that grips you from the start:

"You know the song, don’t you?" “There’s no business like show business.” Harry gets the Ethel Merman intonation just right as he heats up a poker in the gas burner.

How can you not read on, albeit a little nervously?

A once-elegant Victorian mansion in London has been chopped up into individual “bed-sit” apartments occupied by a quirky assortment of tenants, each with his or her own secrets. The enjoyment of this book lies in the claustrophobic atmosphere of the house and the unbearable tension of wondering how each tenant will escape the killer in their midst.