From Friedrich Engels and Mrs Gaskell to WG Sebald and Anthony Burgess, these are some great books about the great city in ‘the south of the north’

In her memoir Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson locates the city of her birth with a laser-guided accuracy: “Manchester is in the south of the north of England,” she writes. “Its spirit has a contrariness … at once untamed and unmetropolitan; at the same time, connected and wordly.”

Others have been more direct in their appraisal, like the Guardian reader Degrus, who commented under a 2009 piece about Manchester’s burgeoning literary renaissance: “Everyone who comes from Manchester knows that it’s a shithole … However, we also know that it’s not a shithole without charm; Mancunians are proud of their shithole. The best writing about Manchester springs from this.” The city has changed a great deal in the intervening years, but writerly interest in what Degrus calls the “whole complicated bloody mess of a situation” remains a constant.

My first collection of poetry, In the Flesh, opened with a poem about an obsessional imaginative remaking of Victorian Manchester. My second, A Herring Famine, charts the journey of my mother’s family from Aberdeen – where they were fishermen – to the city where they came to work in the newly built Trafford Park. Most recently, I’ve been working on a novel following a brother and two sisters in Manchester from 1890 to the eve of the first world war.

As well as being home for much of my life, Manchester has always had a central place in my imagination and my sense of the city is informed by my reading. The following list is, of course, entirely personal: there are many Manchesters and many more writers who have captured the city’s identities and moods than those listed here. These are just the ones who matter most to me.



1. The Emigrants by WG Sebald

Sebald, before his untimely death, was rumoured by many to be in line for the Nobel prize. His Manchester of the 1960s is one wearied and worn down; a stark, near-deserted cityscape that the narrator wanders through disconsolately until meeting the painter Max Ferber. For readers who grew up in the south of the city, there’s a particular thrill in seeing its neighbourhoods subject to Sebald’s attention. Travelling from the airport early one morning, the narrator passes through “the not unhandsome suburbs of Gatley, Northenden and Didsbury”.



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2. The Manchester Man by Isabella Banks

The novel, published in 1876, tells the story of Jabez Clegg, a baby rescued from the river Irk. It still has interesting things to say about selfhood, mutability and the swaths of history that shaped the city’s inhabitants from the Napoleonic wars to the Peterloo massacre. The gravestone of Anthony H Wilson, founder of Factory Records, carries a quote from the novel and gestures towards how the arts are interconnected in the city, linking it to that other Manchester – the irreverent, joyous, after-dark city that Banks may or may not have recognised as she looked down from the window of her father’s Oldham Street home.



3. Cold Water by Gwendoline Riley

On the level of the sentence, there is maybe no finer novelist working in Britain today. By an habitué of the city and its bohemian northern quarter for many years, Riley’s prose captures a certain type of life lived out in barrooms and bedsits. This, her debut, is the story of 21-year-old Carmel McKisco and it is studded with phrases of achingly acute observation. Ice-cold and razor sharp.



4. Mancunia by Michael Symmons Roberts

Coming out this summer, this new collection from the poet and librettist has a spectral quality to it. Mancunia isn’t Manchester but “an imagined city and a fallen utopia”. The collection includes poems such as A Mancunian Taxi Driver Foresees His Death. A work of grace, wit and compelling strangeness; a hymn to the city, that draws on a fascinating range of historical and contemporary sources.



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5. A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney

Initially written as a novel but later turned into a play, this is a work in which drabness and desire walk arm in arm, through the story of Jo and her mother Helen and some very difficult love life. It was later adapted for the screen by Tony Richardson and became a classic of British New Wave cinema. Manchester’s arts have always cross-pollinated, and it would go on to influence a young Steven Patrick Morrissey, who references Delaney and her work in a number of his songs.

6. The Condition of the Working Class in England by Friedrich Engels

Engels shows the contemporary reader the 19th-century skeleton under modern Manchester’s skin: the tanneries, bonemills and gasworks, its filthy rivers and neighbourhoods that have still not been properly rehabilitated. As reportage, it’s first-rate and captivating: the immediacy of the prose as close to time travel as you could wish. Incidentally, Engels – as Sebald did – referred to the North Sea as the German Ocean.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Cotton mills on Union Street in Manchester in 1850. Illustration: Rischgitz/Getty Images

7. Mary Barton by Elizabeth Gaskell

Subtitled A Tale of Manchester Life, Gaskell’s 1848 novel also coveys the difficulties faced by the Victorian working class. Gaskell visited the homes of local labourers, at times incorporating their words verbatim into the dialogue of her story. In her time among the “manufacturing population”, Gaskell was also at pains to precisely record their existence, from dialect words to local superstitions.



8. Little Wilson and Big God by Anthony Burgess

In this first volume of his autobiography, Burgess turns his attention to the city of his youth – from his infancy in Moss Side to his time at Xaverian College and Manchester University. His father’s visit to London is described as an exercise in condescension, with that city then (as perhaps now still) “a day behind Manchester in the arts, in commercial cunning and in economic philosophy”. Moreover, Burgess observes, when foreigners came to Manchester “they came to learn, not to feed ravens and snap Beefeaters”.

9. The Adult by Joe Stretch

Pitched somewhere between a state-of-the-nation novel and a bildungsroman, this quietly comic tour de force won Stretch a Somerset Maugham award. It is the story of Jim Thorne, a man who was once in band but now works on a smoothie stand in a shopping centre. Manchester, for Stretch, is a place where citizens struggle to step clear of the dreams that once sustained them.



10. Adolphe Valette by Cecilia Lyon

For many, LS Lowry’s matchstick men and women are a visual shorthand for Manchester. But for me, for the city’s real mood is captured in the work of the French painter Pierre Adolphe Valette and his “Manchester-scapes”. Luminous, Impressionism-influenced canvases, they show the industrial city in a state of rain-induced dreaminess. Lyon’s book is a meticulously researched and engaging study.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from Oxford Road, 1910 by Adolphe Valette. Photograph: © Manchester City Galleries