Books like New Grub Street

A short book even by our standards, The Warden was Trollope’s first novel. He went on to write forty-seven more, as many short stories and nonfiction books as well, all while working as an important official with the Royal Mail. I love Trollope’s books because he was a master at creating life-like characters who may be filled with flaws, but are always portrayed with loving humour. While The Warden is about a controversy over how the Church of England manages a poor house, the story is carried by the complex people and relationships at the centre of the squabble. This is the first book in the Chronicle of Barsetshire series which spins out the lives of these characters across decades.

Becky Sharpe is a character impossible to forget.

Through all the twists and turns of this plot, Becky shows herself to be both conniving and resilient in her quest to use those around her for her own gain. While not an attractive rendition of human nature, she forever has a wolf at her door and does what she thinks she must to stay one step ahead.

One gets whiplash from sympathizing with her one minute and being appalled by her lack of scruples the next, but, like all the characters she hoodwinks, we are captivated by her as someone who is never boring. She hops from one doomed circumstance to the next, and we are along for the ride.

This book, published in the 1870s, is sometimes considered the best English novel ever written.

It is a monumental work, and while I found it very impressive, I have to admit that reading the long and detailed text felt heavy going at times.

Set in a provincial town with a large cast of characters, it depicts a middle-class way of life very different from that of today, and addresses various social and political questions of the time. One major theme is the psychology of marriage as analysed through the relationships between two ill-matched couples.

Immersed in a boarding school with my parents living on another continent, I searched for comfort and found it in Charlotte Brontë’s novel of a young orphan struggling to make her way in Victorian England.

Although considered by some to be shocking when it was published in 1847, it was a sensation and has never been out of print since. 

"Do you think," she cries to the rich Mr Rochester, the man she loves, "because I am poor, plain and little, that I am soulless and heartless? You think wrong – I have as much soul as you – and full as much heart."

Complete with Gothic frills, brooding landscapes and high drama, leavened with intelligence and psychological acuity, Jane Eyre is a love story which contains one of the great cries for equality in literature.

Who could fail to respond? I certainly did, and I remember it every time… show more.

When researching the newspaper angle of my book, I was already aware of the exploits of Nellie Bly, the New York-based pioneer of investigative, undercover journalism. But I wanted to try and track down a journalist who had achieved similar feats in late Victorian and Edwardian London. Enter Elizabeth Banks, an American journalist who emigrated to London at the turn of the century, and plied her trade as a freelancer, selling exposes on the lives of parlour maids, laundry workers, and flower sellers to the likes of The Illustrated London News. Pluck doesn’t even come close to covering her bravery and bravado – some memorable details from her book include her smuggling a camping stove into a London hotel because she couldn’t afford the dining room food, and pestering editors up and down Fleet Street to publish her words. She was a true entrepreneurial London woman, at a… show more.

I read this book at the recommendation of a friend in her 80s, and its soft, sure steps delivered me somewhere moving, complex, and unusual. It opens with a newspaper article that has nothing to do with the start of the story and which I’d forgotten about by the end, not that it would matter if I hadn’t.

Another author might have given the same subjects an operatic treatment, but I loved how quietly it spoke. I still think about Jean, years after reading it, and wonder what she found in life after the story ended. 

Of course I was always going to pick one of my daughter’s novels! Two women of very different ages come together to save their local Lido. This is a book about community and the power of friendship. And if you like swimming it is definitely the book for you!

Jill is a little-known but fascinating novel from 1884 about a young woman who, bored of her upper-class life, runs away from home to become a maid.

Jill is everything Victorian women weren’t meant to be: ambitious, scheming, brave, happy to lie, and much more interested in money than marriage. She’s also a bit in love with the woman she works for, which Victorian women certainly weren’t meant to be either.

There is so much I love about Jill, but one of my favourite things about it is how it turns Victorian tropes and expectations on their head, taking the set-up of a typically male adventure narrative and giving it to the character of Jill. It’s a wonderfully proto-feminist Victorian classic and well worth a read.

For many Greeks and Greek-Americans, Eleni is a literary north star, especially in the world of non-fiction. On one hand, it’s an urgent and imperative testimony to a brutal and tragic event that the world and history at large have over-looked and forgotten, and on the other, and a more personal level, it’s a poignant and devastatingly powerful testament of a son’s love for his mother. Revenge and forgiveness are constantly at odds and at the forefront of this journey, which also doubles as an important and specific type of immigrant story and experience. Which one will ultimately win out: revenge or forgiveness? In the end, it’s the reader who wins, because the story of Eleni Gatzoyiannis and her son Nikolaos is timeless, unforgettable, and will leave all who read it forever changed.

Dan Lyons’ book is the “fish out of water” trope applied to high-tech. Working in high-tech usually means buying into the grandiose vision of transformation that the company’s technology will produce. In industry parlance: you will be drinking a certain amount of Kool-Aid. Dan doesn’t do this. Instead, he applies a certain skepticism to the work his bosses have asked him to do.

It takes a bit of time to develop cynicism and skepticism in high-tech. By its nature, tech companies are optimistic. When you’re fresh out of school, a high-tech company’s vision and working style seem completely natural. But this isn’t Dan’s first job, and he maintains a near-constant level of incredulity at all the high-tech traditions that he sees around him. This is an intense delight to read.