The United Kingdom and London are prime destinations for French expats: the English capital is said to be home to between 300,000 and 400,000. But in a city that speaks nearly 300 different languages, the landing for newcomers can be abrupt .
Don’t panic though. The novelist Bernardine Evaristo proposes in The New York Times, a small literary guide to better acclimatize in the sprawling agglomeration. With this encouragement:Literary London is not just about the books we read, the plays we watch or the poets who roam the stage: the British capital has a vibrant cultural fabric, designed to increase participation and create a literary culture open to all and not only to a select few.”
Born in Eltham, a district of east London, the writer begins by recommending a few readings before leaving. We find there Mrs Dalloway (1925), de Virginia Woolf, “a modernist short story, with incisive psychology, set in a single day in the heart of London”, the Diary of an Unimportant Man (1892), by George and Weedon Grossmith, which recounts the daily life of a family in the north of the capital, or London, the biography (2003), de Peter Ackroyd, “a unique and colorful account of the city’s history since prehistoric times”.
Audiobook and cemetery
To go further and discover other facets of the city, Bernardine Evaristo offers 26a (2005), by Diana Evans, a novel set in a British-Nigerian family, and Queer City : Gay London from the Romans to the Present Day (2018, untranslated), by Peter Ackroyd, “a work as important as it is entertaining which provides a necessary counterweight to the excessively heteronormative history of the United Kingdom”.
For those who prefer audiobooks, the Booker Prize winner recommends London Clay : Journeys in the Deep City (2021, untranslated), by Tom Chivers, “a documentary work exploring the secret places of the capital, mixing the past and the present, the known and the unknown, the personal narrative with social history and geology”.
Once the boxes are in London, Bernardine Evaristo suggests a few places to enjoy the city’s literary richness. “The British Library, located in Kings Cross, is one of my favorite places to meet people in London and have a coffee. Its basements hold copies of every book, play or other document published in the UK – across eight underground floors. Readers can consult most works in the reading rooms.” For lovers of rare books, The Second Shelf, a bookshop located in the West End, sells original and hard-to-find books.
Finally, London is full of public buildings paying homage to the rich literary life of the country. Bernardine Evaristo’s favorite is Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where more than a hundred writers and poets are buried. Let us quote pell-mell: Charles Dickens, Geoffrey Chaucer, Rudyard Kipling, Jane Austen, Emily and Anne Brontë as well as William Shakespeare or Oscar Wilde.