This book offers a lively overview of London suburban fiction over the last 180 years. Close readings and discussion of work by Dickens, the Grossmith brothers, H. G. Wells, and on through Orwell, Stevie Smith, V. S. Naipaul and Zadie Smith, provides a comprehensive account of key recurring approaches and themes. Suburban fiction highlights the complex connections between place and writing, and focuses on the activities individuals necessarily undertake to make place legible and habitable. Much fiction, looking in at the suburbs from without, anxiously tends to present the popular mass suburb...