Few recent spy series have captured readers quite like Slow Horses. Originally written by Mick Herron, the books follow the misfits, failures, and cast-offs of British intelligence who find themselves banished to Slough House—a crumbling administrative outpost for disgraced MI5 agents. Officially, they’re still employed. Unofficially, they’re expected to become…
With her sharp mind, talent for deduction, and refusal to follow society’s expectations, Enola Holmes has become one of the most popular young detectives in modern fiction. While many readers first discovered the character through Netflix’s hugely successful Enola Holmes films starring Millie Bobby Brown, the character actually began life…
The Rivers of London series has become one of the most beloved urban fantasy series of the last decade. Written by Ben Aaronovitch, the books follow Peter Grant, a Metropolitan Police officer who discovers that London’s hidden magical underworld is very real. What begins as a routine murder investigation quickly…
Long before Netflix turned Bridgerton into a global phenomenon, readers were falling in love with Julia Quinn’s witty Regency romances. Set amongst London’s ballrooms, drawing rooms, and society scandals, the series follows each of the eight Bridgerton siblings as they navigate love, family expectations, and the ever-watchful gaze of the…
The Millennium series books, initiated by the late Stieg Larsson with “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” in 2005, captured the imagination of readers worldwide, becoming a cultural phenomenon. These gripping novels follow the story of journalist Mikael Blomkvist and hacker Lisbeth Salander as they become entangled in a web…
If you’ve been reading about bookish London on this site, Virginia Woolf has already come up more than once; the bust in Tavistock Square, the bombed house in Mecklenburgh Square, the Bloomsbury Group operating out of the same few streets and producing work that still matters a hundred years later….
William Shakespeare wrote somewhere between 37 and 39 plays. Scholars still debate the exact number, and at least one play (Cardenio) is considered lost entirely. He also wrote 154 sonnets and several longer poems. He did all of this between roughly 1590 and 1613, which is the kind of output…
My grandfather was a Dickens man. Every novel on the shelf, read and re-read, spines cracked, pages slightly yellowed. And all of it available to me from a very young age. Which is how I ended up having finished the complete works before I turned ten. Not a reading plan…
If you’ve read anything on this site, you already know how I feel about Sherlock Holmes. He is, in my entirely unbiased opinion, the most London thing to have ever not existed. And the fact that he didn’t exist has never really stopped him from feeling completely real. The canon…
If you’ve spent any time on this site you’ll already know that London is deeply embedded in the Harry Potter universe: King’s Cross, Leadenhall Market as Diagon Alley, the Millennium Bridge (which I still refuse to cross, and if you know you know). But before you go looking for the…