In 2005 Birmingham MP John Hemming ran a competition to name the "greatest West Midlands writer" in history. The nominees, who included Coventry-born Philip Larkin, a poet more closely associated with the city of Hull, and ultimate winner Arnold Bennett, who actually wrote about a part of the world – the Potteries – which was classed as "the north" during his lifetime, illustrating why it is so difficult to talk about "Midlands literature".
It's a part of the country that is formless, and, taking in Shropshire, Warwickshire, the Black Country and Leicestershire, notoriously hard to name.
But having set two books – my memoir The Boy With the Topknot and now my novel Marriage Material - in my home town of Wolverhampton, I do think there is certain way of thinking and writing when you are neither from the north or the south, when you live in an English urban, multicultural setting which is not London.
And for what's it worth, here are 10 books that I think do a great job of capturing the mindset …
1. The Rotters' Club by Jonathan Coe
A beautifully composed coming-of-age novel set in 1970s Birmingham, which was made into a three-part drama for the BBC, and which – more than any other book I have read – captures the torment and excitement of being a teenager. I once interviewed Coe for the FT and remember him saying that the most exciting thing about writing the book was "finding an identity" for himself "as a provincial writer". In the process of doing so Coe also managed to show that the "provincial" need not be, as it too often is, synonymous with the mundane.
2. Toast by Nigel Slater
This memoir has been praised for being poignant and clever, and it really is. It's an amazing technical achievement to tell the complex emotional story of a family through food. But for me, the really intriguing thing was how different Slater's life was from mine. We both grew up in Wolverhampton, but his middle-class upbringing, and its adventures with grilled grapefruit and spaghetti, was a universe away from my 1980s immigrant working-class experience.
3. The News Where You Are by Catherine O' Flynn
The author of the Costa prize-winning What Was Lost is a master of dialogue and social comedy and all her books make me ache with envy, but the idea of setting a novel around a regional TV news programme was particularly inspired. O'Flynn gets a great deal of comedy out of presenter Frank Allcroft, who is described in the book as "the unfunniest man on God's Earth", but her teasing never veers into mockery. A book as humane as it is amusing.
4. The Old Wives' Tale by Arnold Bennett
Published in 1908 and centred on the lives of two sisters growing up in a drapery shop in the Potteries, this forgotten classic is one of the finest English novels. Indeed, it is so sharp when it comes to things like the generation gap, the clash between the provincial and the metropolitan, and marriage, that I used it as a model for Marriage Material. There's not much that separates Bennett's hardworking Wesleyan Methodists from the Punjabi Sikhs who kept Black Country industry motoring in the 1960s and 1970s.
5. Adrian Mole and the Weapons of Mass Destruction by Sue Townsend
I didn't laugh very much when I first read Adrian Mole's diaries. Partly because I was just too young to get the humour, but mainly because it read like documentary to me. If you grow up outside London and have literary pretensions, you are basically Adrian Mole. But I tackled many of Townsend's books again in adulthood, and found them reliably hilarious. This one is a particular work of comic genius.
6. Anita and Me by Meera Syal
If Hanif Kureishi's Buddha of Suburbia was the book that made me realise the British Asian teenage experience could be interesting, this book – about nine-year-old Meera growing up in the only Punjabi family in the Black Country mining village of Tollington – was the book that made me appreciate that immigrant childhoods were perhaps even more so. It's fabulous that it's on the GCSE syllabus now.
7. Moranthology by Caitlin Moran
The question I get asked most often at literary events, along with "how do you get your ideas?" and "where do you write?" is "do you know Caitlin Moran?" She's the most famous thing to come out of Wolverhampton since Noddy Holder. And my answer is usually that I wish I didn't. Because her journalism makes me want to give up even trying – she is in a class of her own, whether tackling Ghostbusters, Twitter, or being a middle-class marijuana addict. A joyful anthology of journalism.
8. Like the Roman: The Life of Enoch Powell by Simon Heffer
Few people remember that Enoch Powell represented Wolverhampton as an MP, or that his "Rivers of Blood" speech was in part inspired by the Sikhs who had just emigrated there en masse. Powell remains a highly controversial figure, but if you want to understand the story of postwar immigration in Britain, and, arguably, postwar British politics at large, you need to read this book.
9. Nice Work by David Lodge
If there is one thing that runs through Midlands literature – and this list, as it happens – it is humour. I suspect this is a consequence of geography: Midlanders are never not aware that they live in an aesthetically-challenged part of the country. And no one harnesses this self-deprecation better than David Lodge. A great comic novel, from one of our best comic novelists.
10. Collected Poems by WH Auden
Auden is known for being many things: an American citizen; an Oxford graduate; one of England's finest poets. But he grew up in and near Birmingham and his affection for the landscape of his youth can be felt through his poetry, not least in this (for me) charming couplet from Letter to Lord Byron: "Clearer than Scafell Pike, my heart has stamped on / The view from Birmingham to Wolverhampton."
