David Annand's Peterdown, a reading list
By David Annand - author
By David Annand - author
Peterdown is a novel of place. Of England past and present, of dilapidated football grounds, exuberant protest camps, fading brutalist estates, ruined abbeys, shuttered high streets.
Writing about all these things involved thinking about modern England and what it means to walk around it, live in it, love it and hate it. Here is a list of some brilliant books that inspired me in all kinds of different ways:
Wanderlust: A History of Walking
Rebecca Solnit
£9.99A wonderful book on the politics and aesthetics of walking - a great inspiration for the walks in Peterdown.
Museum Without Walls
Jonathan Meades
£12.99 £12.34A collection of Meades's many brilliant essays on architecture.
Non-Places: An Introduction to Supermodernity
Marc Auge
£10.99 £10.44A great book that fed into my thinking about Broadcastle's fictional Greenacre shopping mall, a classic non-place.
The Football Man: People & Passions in Soccer
Arthur Hopcraft
£10.99 £10.44A delightful book with lots of illuminating passages about the meaning of proper old-school neighbourhood football stadiums.
Concretopia: A Journey around the Rebuilding of Postwar Britain
John Grindrod
£9.99 £9.49Brilliant stuff on the making of our modern towns.
Games Without Frontiers
Joe Kennedy
£8.99 £8.54A wonderful series of travelogues and essays on modern football.
Ground Control: Fear and happiness in the twenty-first-century city
Anna Minton
£9.99 £9.49Essential reading on Britain's cities under neoliberal capitalism.
The View from the Train: Cities and Other Landscapes
Patrick Keiller
£9.99 £9.49Fascinating essays from the man who created two of my favourite films: 'London' and 'Robinson in Space'.
New Model Island: How to Build a Radical Culture Beyond the Idea of England
Alex Niven
£9.99 £9.49A beautifully written and deeply personal book on how we might create a radical future for England's regions.
Peterdown: An epic social satire, full of comedy, character and anarchic radicalism
David Annand
£8.99 £8.54