Cambridge literature

[girlyswot]

I've been thinking sporadically over the last couple of weeks...

And now I've written that sentence, I really want to end this post there.

...that it would be nice to be reading some Cambridge books while I'm here. I often like to do this - I took The Nine Tailors with me for a memorable holiday in Norfolk; Persuasion when I visited Lyme Regis; one of Bill Bryson's books about America when I was in the US; Outlander in the Highlands and so on. But I've been struggling to come up with any. Which strikes me as odd. I have several very much loved Oxford books - Gaudy Night, The Ready Made Family, The Subtle Knife, and so on.

What am I missing? What would you recommend? Preferably fiction, set at any time within the last 800 years. Though if you have a particularly splendid non-fiction book set in the city that you want to suggest, I'm open to that too.

ETA: Suggestions of Cambridge poems also welcome. The only one I can think of is The Old Vicarage, Grantchester.

Comments

[white_hart]

Rosamund Lehmann's Dusty Answer is partly set in Cambridge, and I suspect might be your kind of thing. And PD James's An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (which I didn't think was brilliant, but it was OK). And Porterhouse Blue, but that may well not be your kind of thing.

topicaltim suggests The Glittering Prizes although he thinks it only begins in Cambridge. And The Common Pursuit by Simon Gray (not the FR Leavis one!), although that's a play.

Douglas Adams's Dirk Gently's Holistic Detective Agency has a lot of Cambridge in, too.

In return, can you think of any Northumbrian books for me to take on holiday?

[amamama.livejournal.com]

LOL! I love the beginning of your post. *g* I've no Oxford books to recommend - the only one I know is The Subtle Knife, but that one has me wanting to explore Oxford!

[nineveh-uk.livejournal.com]

I can only think of books I wouldn't recommend - Forster's Maurice and I think some of Byatt's Frederica Quartet*. Jill Paton Walsh's Imogen Quy books are also set there, but have a tendency to turn me from a Scandinavian social democrat to a violent Communist revolutionary, so I won't recommend those, either.

Did Iris Murdoch set anything in Cambridge? Or Margaret Drabble? They might be worth looking at. I have visions of that host of intelligent 50s/early 60s women who did degrees at Cambridge and then wrote novels to stop themselves going mad when their husbands went to the library and pub and they had to stay in and handwash nappies.

*Though Frederica deserves some note as an extraordinary canon Mary-Sue.

[bookwormsarah.livejournal.com]

I am preparing a talk on Fenland fiction, although at the moment I have the children's books covered and not really progressed onto the adult...

Tom's Midnight Garden (Philippa Pearce) is set around Cambridge (Great Shelford I think), as are the Greene Knowe books by Lucy Boston (Hemingford Grey).

Michelle Spring writes detective stories set in Cambridge, but my favourites are Jill Paton Walsh's Imogen Quy books. There are three in the series: The Wyndham Case, A Piece of Justice (murder with additional patchwork!), and Debts of Dishonour. I loved the first two, but don't really remember the third.

I don't like the Susannah Gregory medieval murder mysteries, but they are set in the city.

The descriptions in The Nine Taylors are very Cambridgeshire fens - all the sluices and drains...

Enjoy! I'll add more if I think of them.

[rhythmaning.livejournal.com]

I just wanted to say that I am completely the opposite: I like to read books about where I'm not!

I'll read books set in the US in India, about Europe in the US and about India in Europe...

Seriously.

If I am visiting somewhere, I want it to be my experience, rather than a vicarious experience determined by a writer.

[brownfach.livejournal.com]

I have Tom's Midnight Garden - read it when you come to stay, as all the children's junior+ fiction is shelved in the spare room!