London at the time of the Great Exhibition is the setting for Macneal’s immersive historical novel. Iris Whittle paints china doll faces but dreams of more, and soon she experiences more, her life heightened by a brush with a member of the Pre-Raphaelite brotherhood. For Iris, London is a place of freedom and captivity, opportunity and danger.

From the opening pages it is clear that Faber’s London is as complex and uncensored, as are the characters that inhabit it. William Rackham, a man with creative leanings and the inheritor of a family trade, embarks on an affair with business-savvy prostitute called Sugar. At home, William’s wife, Agnes, is descending into madness and their daughter is in want of a governess.

The underbelly of London life features wonderfully in this tale. Elements of the sensation novel popularized by the likes of Wilkie Collins can be found here—mistaken identities, hidden secrets, intrigues, and madness. Our heroine’s childhood home is a gloomy, lonely, country mansion. The London where she ventures, by contrast, is a dynamic den of thieves and ne’er-do-wells.

Marley is a gloriously dark descent into the roots of the Scrooge-Marley relationship. Described as “a noirish prequel to A Christmas Carol.” Clinch breathes new life into these characters in a setting as vividly realized as the story he tells. Clinch evokes all the senses, and as a result London rears up—real and troubling and heart-rending.

Morton’s London is as multilayered and as varied as the voices that tell this story. A child abandoned in the streets of Victorian London grows up to become a thief, a muse, and a mistress. When a Thames-side artists’ gathering ends in gunshot, leaving one woman dead and another disappeared, a mystery is created only to be unravelled many years later.

Charles Dickens’s nocturnal wanderings and ceaseless fascination for the London are mapped out here in vivid fiction. His second novel offers a cast of unforgettable characters—workhouse boy Oliver, juvenile pickpocket the Artful Dodger, rotten Bill Sikes, and damned Nancy. And London herself; sprawling, cruel, and absolutely full of darkness and light.