Caledonian Road: A reading list by Andrew O'Hagan

By The Orwell Prizes

A list of books suggested by Andrew O'Hagan, inspired by his Orwell Prize shortlisted novel Caledonian Road.

Caledonian Road: The Sunday Times bestseller

Andrew O'Hagan

£9.99 £9.49

SHORTLISTED FOR THE ORWELL PRIZE FOR POLITICAL FICTION 2024 Bookshop.org Book of the Month Feb 2025

A riveting Victorian novel, a hilarious rebuke to the financial scandals of his day, this is a peerless book of human traffic. Big houses and terrible financial schemes, human avarice and literary ambition — The Way We Live Now book comes freshly off the page and lightens the heart with satire and truth.

The Princess Casamassima

Henry James

£12.99 £12.34

Another serial novel, James’s attempt to do London is filled with the tragic romance of political idealism, and I found it invaluable in thinking about my young student, Milo. While James was conjuring with suspect devices and I was dealing with ethical hacking, the sense of a walkable city — a place of deep social relations, drawing-rooms, prisons — is vital to this notion of what the novel can be, a vehicle of ethical adventure and entertainment, a journey of conscience.

Ulysses

James Joyce

£12.99 £12.34

It may be hard to talk about revolution in fiction, but many of us who enjoy social realism also enjoy the undermining of it. In terms of everyday stuff and the melee of consciousness, Joyce dd the full business, but for me the revolution in style is also social — the way he hurled ‘the little streets upon the great’, to borrow Yeats’s phrase. I have a special interest in streets and so I love Joyce’s magisterial choreography in bringing a multitude of different feet to the tarmac.

Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion

£8.99 £8.54

Essays and reportage can give density and direction to certain novelists, and there are none more attuned to the nervous system than Didion’s. I find the same with Orwell: his essays provide oxygen to the big projects of the imagination, by showing us what we are like.

The Buddha of Suburbia

Hanif Kureishi

£9.99 £9.49

A brilliant, compendious, hilariously stylish book about class, the 1970s, and self-invention in London. A collage of talk and pop and so many of the energies that make London compelling, I consider Hanif to be one of the great literary talents and exemplars of the age.

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

William Blake

£11.99 £11.39

I heard the music of these poems all the time I was writing Caledonian Road. Over the years it took me to write the book, I’d often go to a favourite spot of his at the top of Primrose Hill and look over London, in the winter evenings the skyline a festival of blinking lights, and I’d think — it’s all out there. The poems thrum with a sense of injustice and sublime vision.