This has been sitting on my TBR pile for a couple of years. Wish I had read it sooner. This is a real gem.

The story of a group of people totally immersed in the world of writing and publishing this novel has to be the first stepping stone to Modernism. The trials and tribulations of writing in many genres including journalism and the different and changing styles of novel writing are painfully explored. The world of publishing of both magazines and books are illustrated.

And overlaid on this is the story of love; love of money, love of ambition, love in it's purist form between peoples. Here there is strife, passion, naked ambition, misunderstandings and crossed purposes. All this between characters that are powerfully written so that you can almost see them moving in their environs.

Set in London, a real London it has to be said, with street names that were actual, with descriptions of place that were actual in the 1880s; New Grub Street, a small area around the British Museum, was a hot-house area for the literarti of the time.

But what surprised me more than anything about Gissing's work was the quality of his writing. It is rich in its vocabulary, flowery without being too much so, there is pathos but there is also humour, descriptive without being boring and such wonderful dialogue.

This novel is considered Gissing's finest work. I loved it and feel the urge to read something other of his writing but wonder whether having read the best I will be disappointed - but I will have to read another of his books because I enjoyed this so much.

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Ichigo Ichie - Each moment, only once

"Wish I had read it sooner. This is a real gem."

Yes, Barblue, I must get round to it too: I've heard about it for years but have never got round to getting a copy. It's a good prompt.

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http://www.librarything.com/catalog/hazelk
[SIZE=1]currently reading: A Splendid Exchange: How Trade Changed the World by William Bernstein

"New Grub Street" was on the reading list for my first year in college (sometime in the ice age). Of course, I'd never heard of it, but I enjoyed it thoroughly. I hadn't read it since, though the World's Classics edition I used has been sitting on my bookshelf ever since. Anyway, because Trollope's "Can You Forgive Her?" was proving somewhat slow going (in every sense), I decided to revisit Grub Street this week, and am enjoying it so far. Gissing is good at evoking the nature of the "literary trade" of the time and he has a better sense of narrative pace than Trollope (or perhaps that's a reflection of the shift from longer to shorter novels in the Victorian age--part of Gissing's theme in his novel).