Sarah Waters · 1998 · overland

Sarah Waters's 1998 debut, a Victorian picaresque. Nan Astley, an oyster girl from Whitstable, falls for Kitty Butler, a music-hall male impersonator, and follows her to London, first as her dresser and then as her cross-dressing stage partner and lover. Betrayed, Nan tumbles through the underworld of 1890s London as a rent boy, a kept woman and at last a socialist, in a glorious coming-of-age journey from the Kent coast to the heart of the capital. Most of Waters's novels stay within London; this is the one that travels.

1. 1
   Whitstable

   Nan Astley, an oyster girl on the Kent coast, is smitten with Kitty Butler, a male impersonator at the music hall.

2. 2
   Canterbury

   She follows Kitty's act to Canterbury as her dresser, and the two fall secretly in love.

3. 3
   London

   And on to the glittering music halls of London, where Nan rises as a masher, is betrayed, and falls through the city's strata, from West End fame to the streets to a rich woman's house to the socialist East End, before finding, at last, herself.