The best fantasy books invite you to step foot into a world that feels like a real living, breathing place. Terry Pratchett’s Night Watch ranks in my top five favourite books of all time—a book with not only one of the best characters ever committed to the page (Sam Vimes, of course) but also one of the best cities: Ankh-Morpork. Twenty-five years on and I still want to go to Ankh-Morpork so badly I’d even be prepared to eat one of Cut-Me-Own-Throat-Dibbler’s pies to get there.
Although I suspect you wouldn’t be living and breathing too long if you stepped foot into Ankh-Morpork, the reason it’s such a pleasure to read about is because it’s so fully realised, so immersive, it blurs the boundaries between our perspective as a reader—standing on the outside of the story, looking in… or standing on the bustling streets, ankle-deep in muck oozing from the River Ankh. For me, perfect escapism is a fantasy setting I want to visit—even better is a setting I don’t want to leave.
My debut book, The Nightjar, isn’t set in a world so different from our own. As a portal fantasy, its setting—the Rookery—is based on real-life London: a city I love travelling through and also love reading about. The world of The Nightjar melds together elements of contemporary and historical London life (there are Bakelite phones and Bow Street Runners) and Finnish mythology. I hope it’s a world that readers enjoy as much as I enjoy reading about Ankh-Morpork!
The Nightjar isn’t the first novel to be inspired by London. Here are five other fantasy Londons to escape to—each very (VERY) different. And since The Nightjar blends elements of London from different eras, I thought I’d pick novels set in different decades or even centuries.
Shades of Magic series by V.E. Schwab
This series kicks off with A Darker Shade of Magic, set in Georgian London (specifically, 1819). Not satisfied with the blood, sweat, and tears involved in world-building just one setting, Schwab has created four versions of the city. Grey London, the city with plenty of smoke and no magic (most similar to the true Georgian London); White London, a cruel city of ‘blood and ash’, warped by magic and ruled by power-hungry dictators on marble thrones; Red London, where people and magic flourish together in a healthy harmony, under benevolent rulers; and the legendary Black London, destroyed by its magic and closed off from the others. We follow Kell, a traveller magician and smuggler, as he teams up with Delilah Bard, a Grey London thief, to prevent catastrophe when a dangerous relic from the legendary Black London endangers all four cities.
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A Darker Shade of Magic (Shades of Magic Series #1)
Smoke by Dan Vyleta
In an alternate Victorian London, the people are marked, literally, by sin. Smoke is expelled from the body and soot appears every time a minor misdeed, act of greed, small fib or criminal transgression is committed. This is a world in which every wicked thought and wrongdoing can be seen by others, and no one can hide what lurks beneath the surface. This London, appropriately, is the London of chimney sweeps, factory smokestacks and grimy slums; the city as soiled as its lower-class inhabitants. Yet there is a ruling class who have learned to restrain their more base desires and live smoke-free, their cleanliness and virtue a sign of their right to rule. We follow two young aristocrats, Thomas and Charlie, as they witness an event that makes them question the rules of their society—and uncover the truth about the nature of smoke.
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Smoke
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
This is boss level stuff. The big one. The London-inspired fantasy that spawned them all. Set in the mid-1990s, the story follows Richard Mayhew, a mild-mannered city-worker, whose life is forever changed when he helps the mysterious Door (a girl, not a tall wooden thing with handles) and is catapulted into a strange and wonderful adventure beneath the city. There, in London Below, Richard will find his destiny. Neverwhere plays with London locations and the underground tube network in the most ingenious way—Night’s Bridge, Earl’s Court, Angel Islington, Black Friars are all literal interpretations. A dark and magical world that feels real because… it is real. Sort of.
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Neverwhere
Rivers of London series by Ben Aaronovitch
The first novel in this series is known as Midnight Riot in the US and Rivers of London in the UK. Published in 2011, this is a present-day actual London—a diverse, realistic portrayal of the city, but with magic hiding around every corner. Peter Grant, a young officer in the Metropolitan Police, is recruited to the Folly, a secret branch of the met police that deals with supernatural and magical crimes. There, he becomes the first apprentice wizard in decades. PC Grant sets out to discover who is possessing Londoners and coercing them to commit murder, while trying to bring peace between warring gods, Mama Thames (and her daughters Beverley Brook, Lady Tyburn, Lea and Fleet) and the older Father Thames. This is a London with magic and ghosts but also the personification of the city’s rivers – who feature here as gods passing as ordinary Londoners. In the same way Neverwhere used the tube map, the rivers here are a brilliant riff on London’s geography.
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Midnight Riot
The Bone Season by Samantha Shannon
Well, we’ve seen some versions of London that stretch right from the Georgian era to the present-day, so now it’s time for a London-that’s-yet-to-come. Set some time after the year 2059, this is an altogether more futuristic city. This book arguably straddles a boundary between fantasy and sci-fi, featuring a high-tech city with gangs committing supernatural crimes; under the fascistic Scion regime, clairvoyance and dreamwalking are punishable by execution. When the lead character and secret-clairvoyant, Paige Mahoney, is transported to Oxford to live under the rule of a mysterious, otherworldy race of beings, Paige finds herself in a position to kickstart a revolution and bring down the cruel Scion government.
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The Bone Season
Special mentions to other fantasy Londons (not included here for the purposes of exploring different time periods): A Discovery of Witches by Deborah Harkness, Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell by Susanna Clarke, The Invisible Library by Genevieve Cogman, the Nightside series by Simon Green, Sixty-One Nails by Mike Shevdon, assorted works of China Mieville & Kate Griffin—and finally, one of my all-time favourite fantasy Londons: Diagon Alley in the Harry Potter series by J.K. Rowling.
Right, well now I’m off to read Pratchett’s Night Watch for the eighth time—assuming the dog-eared yellow pages don’t fall out. Happy reading!
Deborah Hewitt is a teacher and previous ‘Undiscovered Voices’ winner living in Manchester. The Nightjar is her debut novel.
May I also add Slow Chocolate Autopsy by Iain Sinclair (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slow_Chocolate_Autopsy)? The main character, Andrew Norton, is trapped in space (that is, the bounds of London), but may move freely through time.
I’ve read and enjoyed about half of the titles on the main and secondary lists, but must note that the Simon Green series is Nightside, not Nightshade.
@2 – Corrected, thanks!
For me the absolute canonical fantasy London is the London of de Larrabeiti’s Borribles books.
The “Onyx Court” books by Marie Brennan, beginning with Midnight Never Come, London in 1590. In the World Above, the royal court of Elizabeth “Gloriana” Tudor; in the World Below, the Onyx Court of Invidiana, Queen of the Fae. Subsequent books are set in various time periods– humans come and go, but the Fae go on forever. Or at least, until the world above intrudes below with its new-fangled, iron-bound London Underground.
I am partial to Paul Cornell’sShadow Police series which starts off as a standard police procedural and turns into something very different, but absolutely centred in particular parts of London, it is rather darker than Ben Aaronovitch’s Rivers of London which I also like. They are friends and were surprised when they discovered they both were independently working on weird police stories set in London.
Hawksmoor, by Peter Ackroyd. It tells 2 parallel stories: one is about the 18th C architect who requires human sacrifices for the London churches he builds; the other is a 20th C detective investigating murders in those very churches. Very much in the tradition of British macabre!
The Matthew Swift books by Kate Griffin are an ode to a future London!
A Madness of Angels [2009]
The Midnight Mayor [2010]
The Neon Court [2011]
The Minority Council [2012]
The one I most enjoy reading about; but NEVER want to visit is that of The Laundry Files.
Ms. Hewitt, your The Nightjar hasn’t shown up on the bookstore shelves where I live yet (and I will probably be waiting a long time given the bookstore situation where I live), but I had noticed the reviews and was wondering if Sir Henry Newboldt’s poem had anything to do with your novel.
China Mieville is mentioned, in passing, but he’s written at least three books about London that I can think of, King Rat, Un Lun Dun, and Kraken. You can tell that he’s a proud Londoner, and each of those books are hymns to London in their own way.
@9 Charlie Stross isn’t a Londoner, and possibly that’s why you don’t like his London as much?
Most Brits have a complicated relationship with London, about 10% of the population live there, but it seems to take up at least 50% of all attention in the country.
We natives would appreciate if you left London alone for a bit, to be honest. Why not set your next fantasy in the Edinburgh of Dorothy Dunnett or Robert Louis Stevenson; or the Manchester of Elizabeth Gaskell; or the Paris of Eugene Belgrand and Victor Hugo; or New Amsterdam/New York, so good they named it again. Or the Chicago of Ellis Chesbrough and Mrs O’Leary’s cow? You get the idea.
What about the London of Gail Carriger’s Parasol Protectorate? With it’s fashionable vampires and kilted werewolves under a sky laden with dirigibles and Queen Victoria’s Shadow Counsel keeping everything running not-so-smoothly. . .
@8: my recollection of the first two Matthew Swift is that they seemed contemporary — but it bounces back and forth so much between the most up-to-date locations and the grottiest that it’s hard to be sure. Note that she’s now started a new series, Magicals Anonymous; leaning to the humorous rather than dark like the Swift set and more of an ensemble B Team coping with being in over their heads, but I found it fitting Pratchett’s dictum that characters in humor have real goals rather than just clowning at us.
I think this is the first set-of-five that I’ve read all of — and I’m from across the Pond and not a habitual Anglophile. All worthy selections, although running a little to the bleak side.
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I quite enjoyed the London of The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – peopled as it is with various literary figures and characters…