The Tower’s twentieth-century fiction collection can tell us much about regional attitudes and the UK's particularly rich tradition of regional writing.

The Library’s mammoth collection of this material gives researchers access to an almost unparalleled collection. It is an additional bonus to have so many in their original dust jackets, giving an insight into publishers’ opinions of their books and the artistry used to sell these to the public.

Dr Alastair Reid, the Cambridge historian responsible for curating this section of the exhibition, says the best examples of regional writing do not focus solely upon or seek to elicit sympathy for the working-class backgrounds that many such writers grew up experiencing.

"The very best regional books and voices in the tower don’t hold a grudge or have a sense of exclusion; they are empowered and self-defining. Different parts of the country are different, and people who write very effectively about that should be taken more seriously, rather than being held up as a spokesperson for some downtrodden group. One of the things I like best and the thing that these books have in common is that they don’t harp on about how deprived they are." Dr Alastair Reid

One of the most interesting books to be featured in Tall Tales is the groundbreaking Lonely Londoners by Sam Selvon, who came to London from his native Trinidad in the 1950s.

Although regarded as a founding father of today's black, British novelists, Selvon remains little-known by the wider literary establishment and British public, an anomaly which is long overdue rectification according to Reid.

Sam Selvon Sam Selvon

The Lonely Londoners was one of the first books to focus on poor, working-class blacks following the enactment of the British Nationality Act 1948 and the arrival of the Windrush Generation.

The book was a major step towards the recognition of the new, multicultural London of the 1950s.

When Sam Selvon was trying to write a novel about the experience of young West Indian migrants in London in the 1950s he kept coming unstuck in his attempts to accurately capture the tone and tenor of life in London's black neighbourhoods.

Then he had the breakthrough idea of writing in something more like the vocabulary and speech rhythms of his native Trinidad. His use of creolised English, or 'nation language' for narrative, as well as dialogue, paved the way for many writers of colour who followed in his footsteps.

The novel explores the loneliness of young workers trying to make their way against the hostile realities of what had seemed to be a city of opportunity. Although their lives are bleak, the idea of becoming a writer emerges as a way out.

Other novels under the Regional Voices theme include Nell Dunn's Poor Cow and The Dear Green Place by Archie Hind.

Deeply influenced by Continental philosophy and James Joyce, Hind's novel is a neglected modernist masterpiece, the sophistication of which evokes the region’s intellectual democracy.

Set in Glasgow, The Dear Green Place is an autobiographical novel written by a young working-class man from a poor background.

It subverts all the expectations that would usually go along with this; a central section describes Hind’s time working in a slaughterhouse, but this was a place and a job he really enjoyed, so there is no sense of it having been oppressive or disturbing in the way the cover suggests.

Meanwhile, Dunn's Poor Cow illuminates her pioneering role in giving voice to London's young working women.

Although she came from an upper-class background, Nell Dunn spent time working in a factory herself, and also lived with and talked intensely to her workmates. Dunn had already produced a book of interviews, Talking to Women, before writing Poor Cow.

The novel takes the form of the interior monologue of a very ordinary, but highly independent young woman, with many echoes of the female voices in James Joyce’s Ulysses.