Books like The Great Stink by Clare Clark
In 1855, engineer William May comes home from the Crimea to take over a key job in reforming London’s underground sewage system. While his work is hampered by local corruption and the looming threat of a cholera outbreak, a murder among the tunnels forces him to question his own sanity and innocence. Long Arm Tom, a ragpicker who roams the sewers with his dog Lady, becomes May’s unlikely ally in uncovering the truth.
First publish date: 2005
Genre: Historical Fiction/19th Century Historical Fiction
Authors: Clare Clark
★
★
★
★
★
0.0 (0 community ratings)
How are these books recommended?
The books recommended for The Great Stink by Clare Clark are shaped by reader interaction. Votes on how closely books relate, user ratings, and community comments all help refine these recommendations and highlight books readers genuinely find similar in theme, ideas, and overall reading experience.
Have you read any of these books?
Your votes, ratings, and comments help improve recommendations and make it easier
for other readers to discover books they’ll enjoy.
Books similar to The Great Stink (18 similar books)
Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens’s 1837-39 social novel, follows an orphan raised in a workhouse who flees to London, joins a gang of pickpockets, and uncovers family secrets while exposing child labour and exploitation.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Zadie Smith’s debut, White Teeth, blends humour and insight to explore race, immigration, family and identity across three generations in London.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Thomas Hardy’s bleak final novel follows Jude Fawley, a stonemason from rural Wessex, whose search for faith, love and independence collides with society’s harsh conventions and leads to tragedy.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Dan Simmons’ historical thriller follows Charles Dickens after a train accident in 1865, reexamining his life, London society, and the unresolved mystery of his final unfinished novel.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
In 1922 London, a neglected villa becomes a boarding house for a frail widow and her daughter, whose lives collide with a modern couple whose presence shifts the house’s silent routine.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
An illuminating social history of nineteenth‑century London, tracing its rapid expansion, technological innovations, and the everyday lives of its inhabitants from markets to sewers, as seen through the eyes of Charles Dickens and meticulous research by Judith Flanders.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Near her hundredth birthday, Roseanne McNulty confronts the impending closure of Roscommon Regional Mental Hospital, revealing her life and Ireland’s hidden past through journals with her psychiatrist, Dr Grene.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
After the Great War, Inspector Ian Rutledge returns to London, haunted by shell shock, and is drawn into a murder case that threatens both his career and his sanity.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Maisie Dobbs, a former housemaid turned Cambridge student, serves as a war‑zone nurse during World War I. After the conflict, she begins a career as a private investigator, and her first case unravels a darker secret that forces her to confront the war’s lingering trauma.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
An Oxford student interviews a 93‑year‑old London Blitz survivor, 93‑year‑old artist Isabel MacFarland, who reveals long‑kept secrets about her wartime experiences and identity.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
In the aftermath of the Blitz, an adult Simon Thorn discovers he was never listed for evacuation and may have unknowingly laid claim to a mysterious past in wartime London, prompting a search that may keep him from finding peace.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
The autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman tells the life story of a Black woman who lived 110 years, spanning from slavery to the civil rights era in the American South.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Beryl Bainbridge’s Master Georgie follows a surgeon‑photographer in Victorian Liverpool whose life spirals from a brothel misadventure to the bloody Battle of Inkerman during the Crimean War.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Adam Miller's love affair with a Jewish woman in post-war Venice is threatened by the dark underbelly of the Occupation and the murky past of the city itself.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
"In Victorian London, filth was everywhere : horse traffic filled the streets with dung, household rubbish went uncollected, cesspools brimmed with 'night soil', graveyards teemed with rotting corpses, the air itself was choked with smoke. In this intimately visceral book, Lee Jackson guides us through the underbelly of the Victorian metropolis, introducing us to the men and women who struggled to stem a rising tide of pollution and dirt, and the forces that opposed them." --from inside jacket flap.
Similar?
✓ Yes
0
✗ No
0
Some Other Similar Books
The Water Room by Christopher BrookmyreThe Body in the Thames by Susiana S. Pearson
The London Underground by David Bennett
Plague and Pestilence by Philip Ziegler
City of London: A History by Peter Ackroyd
Historical Atlas of London by Jonathan Williams
The Thames: A Biography by Peter Ackroyd
Have a similar book in mind? Let others know!
Please login to submit books!