The Launch of London Fictions (but there’s always a China link in there somewhere!) – 24/4/13, Hackney

What looks like a lovely book is London Fictions – a book of essays celebrating the depiction of London in fiction, from Children of the Ghetto and Child of the Jago to NW and Capital. It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. Edited by Andrew Whitehead and Jerry White, London Fictions includes essays by Courttia Newland, Philippa Thomas, Lisa Gee, John Lucas, Cathi Unsworth, Ken Worpole, Angela John, and Sanchita Islam. Additionally there’s an essay on Limehouse and the old London Chinatown by Anne Witchard, who, as regular readers know, wrote Lao She in London for the RAS Shanghai-HKUP China Monograph series I edit. So we’re plugging her.

More details on the book below and if you’re in London on April 24th there’s a launch event at Broadway Book down on Broadway Market in Hackney

London Fictions is a book about London, real and imagined. Two dozen contemporary writers, from Cathi Unsworth to Courttia Newland, reflect on some of the novelists and the novels that have helped define the modern city, from George Gissing to Zadie Smith, Hangover Square to Brick Lane. It is a book about East End boys and West End girls, bed-sit land and dockland, the homeless and the homesick, immigrants and emigrants. All human life is here high-minded Hampstead and boozy Fitzrovia, the Jewish East End, intellectual Bloomsbury and Chinese Limehouse, Black London, Asian London, Irish London, Gay London…