OUR NEW SERIES! Throughout March & April 2015 we'll be compiling our definitive London Reading List. We've asked London Walks Guides & London Walkers to recommend a favorite book or story, and we've also raided the archives here at The Daily Constitutional to bring a rich and varied selection of London-themed and London-set reading matter.
Whether you live here in London, work here, play here or if you are in the throws of planning a trip to visit us here, these are the books you need to read. As usual, you can give us a shout with your own recommendations – thrillers, literary classics, biographies, anthologies, anything! – at the usual email address, via Twitter or Facebook, or simply leave a comment below.
Award-Winning Blue Badge guide Paula suggests…
No.18. The Shardlake Series
My choice for great London book would
actually be a series… the historical mystery books by C.J.Samson, his Shardlake
series (Dissolution, Revelation, Dark Fire, Sovereign, Heartstone and Lamentation).
The Tudors are really in the news with Wolf Hall on the telly and the 500th anniversary of Hampton Court. But if you really want to get an idea of what life was like for ordinary folk in Tudor England during the Reformation, then these books take you right there.
The author builds wonderfully vivid pictures of the hardships of the dissolution of the monasteries for the poor. In the latest book - Lamentations – you can start to imagine just what Paternoster Square was like when it was full of printers and booksellers, the Inns and the dangers of getting round the City of London at night. There is a wonderful paragraph when a neighbor shouts out for the noise to stop outside their window, just as you may do so today.
Once you have read these books, why not come and walk in the footsteps of the great central character Matthew Shardlake – The Shardlake's City walk with London Walks takes place on Sunday June 14th at 2.30p.m, meeting at Temple Tube.
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