A surprisingly literary city — Nottingham was named UNESCO City of Literature in 2015 — with a particular line in working-class fiction that doesn't romanticise its subject.
Ivanhoe — Scott's 1819 novel is the book that fixed the modern image of Robin Hood: a Saxon outlaw resisting Norman oppression in Sherwood Forest, in alliance with a returning Richard the Lionheart. The Robin Hood of the medieval ballads was an altogether shiftier figure; Scott invented the noble-rebel version that has dominated ever since, including in Nottingham's own marketing. Read it for what it did, not necessarily for what it is.
Saturday Night and Sunday Morning — Sillitoe's 1958 novel follows Arthur Seaton, a 22-year-old lathe operator at the Raleigh bicycle factory in Nottingham, through his weekends of drinking, fighting and sleeping with other men's wives. It's a foundational text of British "kitchen-sink" realism — angry, funny, and unillusioned about the working-class city it describes. Half a century on, it still reads as a more honest portrait of Nottingham than anything the tourist board would prefer.
Sons and Lovers — Lawrence grew up in Eastwood, a mining village ten miles north-west of Nottingham, and his 1913 autobiographical novel is set in and around the coalfields of the city's hinterland. The book follows Paul Morel's coming of age in a Nottinghamshire pit village, his complicated relationship with his mother, and his attempts to escape both. The landscape — the slag heaps, the woods, the trains running into Nottingham — is rendered with extraordinary specificity.