Ten of the best city novels

Elizabeth Day, an award-winning journalist and author, is currently a feature writer at the Observer. She has written three novels: Scissors, Paper, Stone, Home Fires and Paradise City.

At the Guardian, Day tagged her ten favorite books about cities, including:

The Dog by Joseph O’Neill (2014)

In his critically acclaimed 2008 novel Netherland, O’Neill took on New York. In The Dog, his narrator is a lost and tormented Manhattan lawyer working in Dubai for a family of Lebanese billionaires. In O’Neill’s hands, Dubai becomes a metaphor for the futility of the narrator’s cosseted existence: the city is depicted as a place of empty luxury and moral ambiguity full of luxury resorts and glitzy high-rise apartment buildings. At the end of the book, the narrator revisits New York and is shocked to realise he hates it. He is drawn ineluctably back to Dubai, much to his own bafflement.

Read about another book on the list.

Also see Annalee Newitz's top ten books to help you untangle the mysteries of today's city life, Dell Villa's top five literary escapes to American cities, Leo Hollis's ten top books about cities, and Mark Binelli's ten favorite cities in literature.

--Marshal Zeringue