Helen Forrester, Twopence to Cross the Mersey (1974). Memoir of a middle-class family that fell into destitution and ended up in 1930s Liverpool slums. Still one of the most-read accounts of working-class Liverpool life — and the start of a popular four-book sequence.
Beryl Bainbridge, The Dressmaker (1973). A short, sharp novel of two spinster sisters and a niece in postwar Liverpool, by the city-born Booker-shortlisted novelist. Captures the claustrophobia and humour of mid-century Liverpool family life.
Linda Grant, The Clothes on Their Backs (2008). Less specifically about Liverpool, but Grant — born in the city — writes about émigré families with the eye of someone who grew up on the Wirral.
Mark Lewisohn, Tune In (2013). The first volume of the definitive Beatles biography. Half the book is set in Liverpool and is the best account of the city in the late 1950s and early 1960s that anyone has written.
Cathy Roberts, Liverpool: Wondrous Place (2007). Paul Du Noyer's history of Liverpool music from the 1950s to the present — Merseybeat, the Mersey poets, Frankie Goes to Hollywood, the Bunnymen, the La's. Essential.