Iain Sinclair's Book Recommendations (Updated for 2026)

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1

The Secret Agent

Joseph Conrad, Roger Tennant

3.6

The Secret Agent is the unsurpassed ancestor of a long series of twentieth-century novels and films which explore the confused motives that lie at the heart of political terrorism. In its use of powerful psychological insight to intensify narrative suspense, it set the terms by which subsequent works in its genre were created. Conrad was the first novelist to discover the strange in-between territ

Recommended by Iain Sinclair, Jason Burke, and Jessica Stern.

Iain Sinclair

There are lots of reasons I’m very fond of Conrad as a writer. I like visions of London that come translated or diffused or refracted through other cultures. In that way, I suppose, I like this book in the same way I like my first choice, the Céline. Coming here out of his Polish background, Conrad picked up on the elements you were talking about in terms of Dickens — the city as a labyrinth of conspiracies and overloads. In The Secret Agent, you go from a shop in Soho into a space like Greenwich Park, where the bomb incident takes place – quite an interesting journey in itself – and then, at the end, there’s an extraordinary marching-away into the suburbs of one of the characters who walks through endless anonymous, curious areas. So it’s another navigation of London, but this time it’s the London of conspiracy and paranoia, the London of imported terror groups or anarchist groups who come from other places but enact their dramas here. [source]

Jason Burke

Basically, anything you want to know about how terrorism works you can find in this book. It is not necessarily about who is behind terrorism because in this book it is a shadowy foreign state that wants an agent provocateur in London to explode Greenwich Observatory to make a point. [source]

Jessica Stern

Yes, I thought I was being clever and unique and didn’t realise so many other people had made the connection. The book is based on an incident that actually did occur when an anarchist tried to blow up the Royal Observatory. In the novel, a group of hapless anarchists are trying to incite a rebellion. Their main concern is that British society is too liberal and they want to demonstrate that this kind of thing can occur. [source]

2

Hangover Square

Patrick Hamilton

4.3

Hamilton captures the edgy, obsessive and eventually murderous mindset of a romantically frustrated British man in this WWII-era novel. London 1939, and in the grimy publands of Earls Court, George Harvey Bone is pursuing a helpless infatuation with Netta who is cool, contemptuous and hopelessly desirable to George. George is adrift in hell, until something goes click in his head and he realizes t

Recommended by Iain Sinclair and Simon Brett.

Iain Sinclair

I chose Patrick Hamilton because he hits, in particular, on the derangement of the city. He was a big drinker. His writing is like the hallucination or the delirium of an alcoholic dream, and sees London as a kind of nightmare. [source]

Simon Brett

Yes. It’s a study of schizophrenia, in a way. The main character, George Harvey Bone, goes into these strange trance states. Like a lot of Patrick Hamilton’s characters, he is devoted to a woman who is not worthy of him, who is one step up from a prostitute. He’s obsessed with her, and eventually ends up murdering her. It’s just an incredibly written, claustrophobic book that would be in my top five almost any day you rang me. Patrick Hamilton goes in and out of fashion – and I’m not sure he’s ever been as popular in the States as he is in the UK – but a lot of crime writers like him because he has this strange claustrophobia. And he can be funny too, about fairly nasty things. [source]

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3

London Bridge

Louis-Ferdinand Celine, Louis-Ferdinand C Line, Dominic Di Bernardi, Dominic Bernardi

4.0

One of the last major untranslated works by France's most controversial author, London Bridge is a riotous novel about the London underworld during World War I. Picking up where Guignol's Band (1944; English translation 1954) left off, Céline's autobiographical narrator recounts his disastrous partnership with a mystical Frenchman (intent on financing a trip to Tibet by winning a gas-mask competit

Recommended by Iain Sinclair.

Iain Sinclair

I chose London Bridge because I love the idea of a totally non-Anglicised consciousness looking at our city as a construct. Because Céline is a deeply French writer, in a totally different tradition, he sees London mythologised as a fictional entity – and he treats it with a dynamism and an energy that I don’t find in English writing. Also, he makes these wonderful, crazy trajectories across the city, from Willesden down to the docks and so on, as a way of trying to configure how he would escape from the incredible density and multitude and magnificence of this mad place in which he finds himself. For me, that’s a wonderfully inspiring way to look at London, as compared to the account of a local writer, who might tend to stratify society and deal with its movements in the classic sense that you find in Thackeray or Dickens or Trollope. [source]

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4

Mother London

Michael Moorcock

3.8

Three hospital outpatients all find that they hear voices - the voices of London's past. As they explore the city of their present day, they also explore its recent past and its forgotten people. Through the lives of those on the fringe of society, we learn what it is like - and what it has always been like - to live in the great, sprawling, polyphonic, multicoloured capital.

Recommended by Iain Sinclair.

Iain Sinclair

In a sense, Mother London connects with what I’ve just been talking about. Michael Moorcock is probably best known generally for a series of sword and sorcery novels, but he’s also very much in the tradition of the earlier writing I mentioned: Victorian-Edwardian ideas of fiction, of the man of letters, the guy who turns his hand to any form of writing and is very much a person of London. [source]

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5

Our Mutual Friend

Charles Dickens, Richard Gaughan

4.0

A satiric masterpiece about the allure and peril of money, Our Mutual Friend revolves around the inheritance of a dust-heap where the rich throw their trash. When the body of John Harmon, the dust-heap’s expected heir, is found in the Thames, fortunes change hands surprisingly, raising to new heights “Noddy” Boffin, a low-born but kindly clerk who becomes “the Golden Dustman.” Charles Dickens’s la

Recommended by Christine L. Corton and Iain Sinclair.

Iain Sinclair

This book comes very late in Dickens’s own career, but it has a powerful sense – a sense that’s been crucial to me – of London depending on the river. [source]

Christine L. Corton

We have this tour de force writing where he describes the London fog. It’s grey in the countryside and as it moves closer to the centre of the City of London it gets blacker and blacker. [source]