Book reviews: Tales of the North, London, Paris and Faraway Nearby

This could have been accurately titled The North West (And Almost Everything In It), as Paul Morley’s extensive homage to life in the North could prove something of a disappointment for readers hoping for a few more facts about areas further North East.

While Surrey-born, Morley moved to Eccles, near Manchester before he started school and has always been a champion for the area and its’s music.

There’s no denying the painstaking research that has gone into the music journalist’s love letter to the North. A mix of geography and Morley’s own personal memoirs, interspersed with northern anecdotes and historical snippets that move back through time, The North takes some getting your head around in the first few pages.

Readers who persist with it (or who take the less daunting option of dipping in and out) will be rewarded with titbits such as the Newcastle location of a Beatles songwriting triumph, the Moss Side inspiration for A Clockwork Orange and the fact a Liverpudlian invented the crossword.

At times it’s a little too list-like, especially when it comes to Morley’s sweeping descriptions of even the most trivial of subjects.

However, this is endless fun for fact fans and it’s hard for any Northerner not to feel stirred by Morley’s pride in the area.

Tale of Two Cities: Paris, London and the Birth of the Modern City

Jonathan Conlin (Atlantic Books, £25)

Zachary Boren

Historian Jonathan Conlin journeys back to Victorian London and Belle Epoque Paris to explore the relationship between these sibling cities.

He traces their homes and their streets, studies their art and their food, visits their embryonic underworlds and invokes important figures like Emile Zola and Charles Dickens. Conlin’s tome is well considered, researched and written. It’s also littered with some terrific illustrations. Though not a light read, it is a celebration of modernity, and an exceptional work of psychogeography.

The Faraway Nearby

Rebecca Solnit (Granta, £16.99)

Katie Archer

American author Rebecca Solnit is best known for Wanderlust, a history of walking. Her latest release is a memoir, chronicling a year in the writer’s life as her mother, who has given her almost nothing since childhood, battles Alzheimer’s disease.

This unhappy relationship is central to Solnit’s book, which relives a cancer scare, the death of a close friend and a trip to the frozen north of Iceland. Crafted as a series of essays, each leads down a different path as they expand our understanding of the nature of storytelling.

The Faraway Nearby is a work of art with many layers, and readers will be rewarded each time they revisit this wonderful book.