Reading Londons suburbs : from Charles Dickens to Zadie Smith This book offers a lively overview of London suburban fiction over the last 180 years. Close readings and discussion of work by Dickens the Grossmith brothers H. G. Wells and on through Orwell Stevie Smith V. S. Naipaul and Zadie Smith provides a comprehensive account of key recurring approaches and themes. Suburban fiction highlights the complex connections between place and writing and focuses on the activities individuals necessarily undertake to make place legible and habitable. Much fiction looking in at the suburbs from without anxiously tends to present the popular mass suburb as comprising a key set of problems associated with modernity: as being unknown and unknowable social space as soullessly repetitive and empty as lacking familiar co ordinates of specific place and cultural tradition. This book explores why the suburb in much fiction is seen to fail in its primary function of offering a knowable habitable landscape a home or even a tenable sense of identity.