Top ten books of the Midlands

Sathnam Sanghera is a British journalist and author of Marriage Material: A Novel and The Boy With The Topknot: A Memoir of Love, Secrets and Lies in Wolverhampton. He claims "there is certain way of thinking and writing when you are neither from the north or the south, when you live in an English urban, multicultural setting which is not London," and tagged ten top books that capture that mindset, including:

Nice Work by David Lodge

If there is one thing that runs through Midlands literature – and this list, as it happens – it is humour. I suspect this is a consequence of geography: Midlanders are never not aware that they live in an aesthetically-challenged part of the country. And no one harnesses this self-deprecation better than David Lodge. A great comic novel, from one of our best comic novelists.

Read about the other books on the list.

--Marshal Zeringue