Bernard Kops remembers the East End of his childhood, desperately poor and teeming with Jewish immigrants, full of hopes and ambition. His Hamlet of Stepney Green brought the vernacular East End voice to the stage and made him famous overnight. Monica Ali’s novel Brick Lane, explores the difficulties its Bengali residents experience today, receiving huge acclaim and success but a mixed reception within the community itself. In Oona King’s new memoir,House Music, she admits she loved r...

Here are two beautifully written and meticulously researched new novels. Alison Pick’s Booker-longlisted novel, Far to Go, is set in the months leading up to Hitler’s invasion of Czechoslovakia where the Bauer family are wrestling with the prospect of sending six year old Pepik on the kindertransport to England. The young traveller in Jake Wallis Simons’ The English German Girl, Rosa, is fifteen. Upon leaving Berlin she is faced with the tremendous burden of securing papers to help the ...

Fractured and fractious families are at the heart of two witty contemporary morality tales. Amanda Craig’s The Lie of the Land traces the trajectory of the sexually unquenchable Quentin and his unhappy partner, Lottie, whose problems only escalate when they decamp to Devon’s remote arcadia. Francesca Segal’s razor-sharp, The Awkward Age, tells of the fallout when two families merge in North London and civil war ensues.