New Grub Street

I'm really loving Gissing and the way he focuses on the lives of lower-middle and middle-middle class Londoners - I find this stuff so much more relatable than most of his contemporaries with their focus on landed gentry.

The characters' problems are all so familiar: the rents are too high, the wages are too low, the air is polluted, chronic bronchitis, everyone is an artist, every artist is either starving or floated by a rich daddy, everyone's back hurts, the dating scene is all grifters and golddiggers. A character casually invents Twitter in chapter 33, gets funded, goes on to a startup life. In 1883! London really is eternal.