My favourite on screen/video game book adaptation: It was first book I’d ever read about children who were like me, living in an environment like mine, thinking and doing the things that I did.” My top place to read in London:Īt my local greasy spoon while having a bacon salad sandwich. Ben said: “I remember having this read to me in primary school and it left an indelible impression. This novel charts the friendship between Barry, a shy sickly boy, and Hal, the extrovert West Indian girl who befriends him. Ackroyd portrays London from the time of the Druids to the beginning of the twenty-first century, noting magnificence in both epochs, but this is not a simple chronological record. Mona Lisa Overdrive is a cyberpunk novel published in 1988 and the final novel of the Sprawl trilogy, following Neuromancer and Count Zero. Gibson’s unique world – lyric and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting – where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace.įor Peter Ackroyd London is a living organism, with its own laws of growth and change, which is why this is referred to as a biography rather than a history. Here are Ben’s choices: My top 3 books about/set in London: Fantasy-Faction is delighted to say that the the amazing Ben Aaronovitch has chosen Fantasy-Faction as his first stop! 🙂 To celebrate this year’s London Book and Screen Week, five top authors will be revealing their favourite books about London on seven top blogs over seven days, as part of the first ever ‘London Book & Screen Week Blog Tour’.

Hal by Jean MacGibbon