Open City

Teju Cole (2011)

Cole’s novel focuses on Nigerian immigrant Julius, a graduate studying psychiatry in New York who has recently broken up with his girlfriend and spends most of his time dreamily walking around Manhattan. As with Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway before it, Open City centres on the thoughts of its protagonist as he rambles through the city, mulling over what he witnesses as he walks, but also over key past events. Open City was translated into 10 languages and received positive reviews, with James Wood in the New Yorker calling it a “beautiful, subtle, and, finally, original novel”.

Sister Carrie

Theodore Dreiser (1900)

Published at the dawn of a new century, Sister Carrie tells the story of a young country girl from Wisconsin who moves to Chicago to pursue the American dream. Her journey takes her from working in a shoe factory to having an affair with a wealthy man and, later, becoming a famous actor. The book is a depiction of urban life on the brink of shifting modernity and reveals how 19th-century morality and values were crumbling in the face of city existence and capitalist greed. Dreiser initially struggled to find a publisher, but Sister Carrie went on to be hailed by critics as one of the greatest American urban novels of all time.

Ulysses

James Joyce (1922)

Joyce once claimed that if Dublin “suddenly disappeared from the Earth, it could be reconstructed from my book”. Ulysses is seen by many as one of the most influential works of the 20th century and focuses on the stream-of-consciousness wanderings through Dublin of Stephen Dedalus and Leopold Bloom. It mirrors the structure of Homer’s Odyssey, transposed to Dublin and taking in many of the city’s landmarks, including Davy Byrne’s pub, the Martello tower at Sandycove and Trinity College. Ulysses has been summarised, not wholly unfairly, as: “Man goes for a walk around Dublin. Nothing happens.”

Bonfire of the Vanities

Tom Wolfe (1987)

Viewed by many as the quintessential New York novel, Bonfire of the Vanities is a buzzing, booming, narrative tour de force. It is a perfect example of Wolfe’s “new journalism” and skewers a vast cross-section of New York society – from egomaniacal Wall Street millionaires to glad-handing street politicians – painting a vivid picture of a city declining inexorably into racial conflict, crime and greed. It also contains passages of sheer descriptive verve, like this one on Manhattan: “The towers were jammed together so tightly, he could feel the mass and stupendous weight… the dense magnetic rock…”

Bleak House

Charles Dickens (1853)

London was a central character in many of Dickens’s novels, reflecting his own love of walking through the city. His perambulations were often conducted at night after he had dashed off a review in his job as theatre critic before striding home to Bloomsbury and, later, Marylebone. Of his works I’ve chosen Bleak House for its magnificent opening paragraph, where London is described with brilliantly damp and gloomy lyricism: “Implacable November weather. As much mud in the streets as if the waters had but newly retired from the face of the Earth, and it would not be wonderful to meet a Megalosaurus, forty feet long or so, waddling like an elephantine lizard up Holborn Hill.”

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov (1966)

Bulgakov’s coruscating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest days of Stalinist Russia but not published for more than two decades. It exists in a world that blends fantasy and chilling realism, with much of the action taking place in downtown Moscow. Bulgakov set many scenes in areas to which he had strong personal ties and used the city as a symbolic backdrop to key narrative moments: the novel opens in the Patriarch’s Ponds park, where the bombastic, arrogant editor Berlioz falls on to the tram tracks and loses his head, thereby demonstrating his inconsequence and the triviality of his ideas.

NW

Zadie Smith (2012)

Both Zadie Smith’s first novel, White Teeth, and her fourth, NW, are set in the Willesden streets near where she grew up and portray an invigoratingly diverse London where friendships are mapped out across social and cultural divides. NW has a firm sense of place, – the title, after all, is the geographic half of a postcode for north-west London – and Smith is expert at conveying the city’s messy charm as well as its capacity for disconnection. The novel centres on friends Natalie and Leah, who grew up on the same housing estate and attended the same school. As adults they still live in the same neighbourhood, but their lives have taken very different directions.

The Dog

Joseph O’Neill (2014)

In his critically acclaimed 2008 novel Netherland, O’Neill took on New York. In The Dog, his narrator is a lost and tormented Manhattan lawyer working in Dubai for a family of Lebanese billionaires. In O’Neill’s hands, Dubai becomes a metaphor for the futility of the narrator’s cosseted existence: the city is depicted as a place of empty luxury and moral ambiguity full of luxury resorts and glitzy high-rise apartment buildings. At the end of the book, the narrator revisits New York and is shocked to realise he hates it. He is drawn ineluctably back to Dubai, much to his own bafflement.

A Fine Balance

Rohinton Mistry (1995)

Mistry has been compared to Dickens with good reason: he is masterful at handling a sprawling cast of engaging characters and adept at conveying the sweep of a teeming city. This magnificent novel captures all the corruption, dignity and heroism in 1970s Bombay at the time of Indira Gandhi’s declaration of a state of emergency. The political turmoil at play is vividly portrayed through the lives of four disenfranchised characters, including two “untouchable” tailors whose efforts to escape the terrible limitations of the caste system have brought them to the city in search of a better life.

Capital

John Lanchester (2012)

Lanchester’s London is a city on the brink of financial implosion. Set prior to and during the 2008 economic crisis, much of the novel’s action takes place on a single road in south London, subjected to gentrification during the boom years and now hosting a multifaceted bunch of residents, including a successful currency dealer, a Hungarian au pair, a pensioner with a brain tumour and the owner of a corner shop whose brother is flirting with Islamic fundamentalism. Lanchester’s canvas is broad and compassionate: few other modern novelists would dare to make a hero of a traffic warden.

Elizabeth Day’s latest novel, Paradise City, exploring contemporary London life through the lives of four key characters, is published by Bloomsbury on 21 May (£16.99)