London Under: The Secret History Beneath the Streets / Peter Ackroyd

Peter Ackroyd wrote the ultimate Londonophile’s companion to the city with 2003’s London: The Biography, which was not a chronological history in the traditional sense but a rather fascinating thematic approach to all things London. Now he’s dug a little deeper (pun intended) and produced this volume that addresses the things that exist under London’s streets. Most people are familiar with the tube and maybe even Churchill’s Cabinet War Rooms, but there's so much more to be uncovered, so to speak. Graves, wells, hidden rivers, secret tunnels and air raid shelters, layers and layers of archeology—it’s really pretty fascinating. Just to illustrate how fascinating, have a look at the following excerpt, which chronicles the historical investigations that accompanied the extension of the Jubilee tube line when it pushed across the Thames and then towards Canary Wharf:

[The Jubilee Line] travelled back 5,000 years. In the depths of the new system were uncovered pieces of Neolithic pottery and Roman tiles, a twelfth-century quay, a thirteenth-century gatehouse and a fourteenth-century wool market. Mosaic floors, and painted walls have also been identified. When the Jubilee was taken beneath Southwark High Street it found an older street, dating from AD 60, lined with houses of clay or timber; ruts were observed in the street, made by carts and chariot wheels. Now the commuter, or passenger, passes over them at a different speed. When the line went out to Stratford it unearthed an Iron Age settlement and a Cistercian monastery of the twelfth century. “It’s chaotic down there,” the architect of the Jubilee Line extension said, “you can’t believe what’s going on.” p. 147-8.

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Here we are / Graham Swift

This short novel offers a nostalgic look at England in the 1940s and 1950s. Evie, having just lost her husband after a long marriage, looks back at the fateful summer when they met up at the pleasure palace at the end of the Brighton pier. Evie was meant to marry someone else, Ronnie Doane, aka “The Great Pablo,” a magician whose talents really pull in the crowds in the days before television kept people in their front rooms (and to whom she serves as the feather-plumed magician’s assistant). The novel tells of Ronnie’s back story as a London child war evacuee, whose second family in Oxford is so nurturing and loving that he is conflicted about going back to his real home when the war is over. But Evie marries Jack instead and is ghosted (quite literally) by Ronnie even in her final years of life. A wonderful story about people and relationships.

Addie Pray / Joe David Brown (more recently published as Paper Moon ) Click here to check for availability at AFPLS This 1971 novel was the inspiration for the Peter Bogdanovich movie Paper Moon . Eleven-year-old Addie and her maybe-father “Long Boy” Moses Pray crisscross the Deep South “ramifying” (scamming) people during the Great Depression. Addie’s street smarts and perceived girlish innocence, along with Long Boy’s cleverness and shrewd business acumen build their operation until they are dealing in millions. The movie remained pretty true to the first half of the book (though it moved the location from Alabama to Kansas), but the adventures continue far beyond where the movie left off. The decades haven’t dimmed the magic of this rollicking adventure, either in the film or the book. ©Ken Vesey, 17 June 2010

The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie / Alan Bradley

Pippi Longstocking meets Miss Marple in the character of precocious 11-year-old Flavia de Luce, the youngest of three daughters in a once well-to-do family in early 1950s rural England. This first mystery in an intended series finds Flavia beating the local police inspector at his own game in solving the mystery surrounding the murder of an old school mate of her father's in their back garden (in the cucumber patch no less). Clues include a bird indigenous to Norway, a rare stamp, and a bit of flaky pie crust. This nostalgic and innocent whodunnit will have you at the edge of your seat by its suspenseful climax. I can see BBC/PBS picking up on the popularity of this charming mystery. The second in the series has already been published and the third is soon to follow. And by the way, here's a great library quote from Flavia on page 50: "... it occurred to me that Heaven must be a place where the library is open twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week. No

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