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’ . Fantasy-Faction is delighted to say that the the amazing Ben Aaronovitch has chosen Fantasy-Faction as his first stop! 🙂

Here are Ben’s choices:

My top 3 books about/set in London:

MONA LISA OVERDRIVE – William Gibson

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.

London: The Biography – Peter Ackroyd

For 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. 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.

Hal – Jean MacGibbon

This novel charts the friendship between Barry, a shy sickly boy, and Hal, the extrovert West Indian girl who befriends him. Ben said: “I remember having this read to me in primary school and it left an indelible impression. 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:

At my local greasy spoon while having a bacon salad sandwich.

My favourite on screen/video game book adaptation:

Missing

The Costa Gavras’ and Donald E. Stewart’s adaptation of Thomas Hauser’s book The Execution of Charles Horman. It is a true story that argues Horman, an American who was killed in the Chilean coup of 1973, may have accidentally discovered evidence of U.S. involvement and may have been executed with U.S. knowledge.

This year, London Book & Screen Week will be taking place from 13^th – 19^th April, uniting readers, writers, gamers and film fans, with hundreds of events taking place across the capital that celebrate stories and the written word in all its forms.  Events are listed at:  http://www.londonbookandscreenweek.co.uk/

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