Welcome to this week’s Top 5 Tuesday post. Top 5 Tuesday was created by Shanah at Bionic Book Worm, and it is now being hosted by Meeghan at Meeghan Reads. For details of all of the latest prompts for July to September, see Meeghan’s post here.

This week’s theme is books that are set in a big city, think crowds and tall buildings.

The Last Rose of Shanghai by Weina Dai Randell – historical fiction set in Japanese-occupied Shanghai, this is a World War Two romance, the story of Aiyi Shao, a young heiress and the owner of a glamorous Shanghai nightclub and Ernest Reismann, a penniless Jewish refugee who had fled from Germany. I loved the beginning of this book but the rest of the book was not so good – too much ‘telling’ and I’d have liked less focus on the romance, which to me was barely believable.

Breakfast at Tiffany’s by Truman Capote book is a quick read and very entertaining. The narrator is not named, although Holly Golightly calls him ‘Fred’ after her brother. He’s a writer and at the beginning of the book he is reminiscing about Holly with Joe Bell, who ran a bar around the corner on Lexington Avenue. They hadn’t seen or heard from Holly for over two years. She used to live in the apartment below Fred’s in a brownstone in the East Seventies in New York. Her past is almost as unknown as her present whereabouts.

Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, set in Victorian London, has a cast of wonderful characters and numerous subplots. The setting is superb, beginning with the opening chapter revealing a darkly atmospheric scene on the River Thames, a modern scene for its first readers, with a macabre story of a boatman, Gaffer Hexham and his daughter, Lizzie, searching the Thames for human corpses. Dickens highlights social injustices, the class system, the importance of money, property, greed and materialism and also highlights family relationships – in particular that of fathers and daughters and the position of women. He also concentrates on instances of violence, through drownings and physical assaults.

he Dancing Bear by Francis Faviell – a moving memoir of the Occupation. Set in Berlin it covers the years from autumn 1946 to autumn 1949 and is mainly about her friendship with the Altmann family. Frances is horrified by the conditions she found. There were deaths from hunger and cold as the winter approached and queues for bread, milk, cigarettes, cinemas, buses and trams. I was fascinated by it all – the people, their situations, and their morale and attitudes as well as the condition of Berlin in the aftermath of World War Two. The realities of living under occupation are clearly shown, as well as the will to survive despite all the devastation and deprivation.

The Paris Library by Janet Skeslien Charles. historical fiction, based on the true Second World War story of the librarians at the American Library in Paris. It was established in 1920 by the American Library Association with books and periodicals donated by American libraries to US soldiers serving their allies in World War I. Since then it has developed into the largest English language lending library in Europe. I liked the details about the Library, and about the work the library staff did during the War, including delivering books by hand to their Jewish subscribers in Paris after they were not allowed to enter the Library. The author had worked in the American Library in 2010 and her colleagues had told her the story of the Library during the Second World War and had given her access to documents, correspondence and contacts.