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I'm keen to read books about lawyers, litigation and justice. Which do you recommend?

Lawyers

A courtroom, which pits adversaries against each other, has much dramatic potential. The investigations which precede the oratory and arguments are mysteries to be solved. Right and wrong meet in battle, to become winners and losers. It can be gladiatorial, within a system of sometimes arcane rules and conventions which constitute a self-contained and highly regulated world. These books offer lawyers as their heroes, and sometimes as their villains.

· The dense London fog is an apt metaphor, in Charles Dickens’ Bleak House, for the obstructive obfuscation of the legal profession and, in particular, the notoriously endless Jarndyce and Jarndyce lawsuit.

· A legal thriller better known as a movie is The Firm by John Grisham, in which a young and ambitious lawyer discovers that he works for is actually a front for a dangerous crime family.

· A leading High Court judge must decide whether a 17-year-old can refuse the medical treatment which will save his life in The Children Act by Ian McEwan.

· Atticus Finch is the lawyer in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird, the epitome of justice, reason and kindness; its sequel, Go Set a Watchman, shows his feet of clay.

· Franz Kafka’s The Trial was published posthumously and incomplete; it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by an unknown authority for an unknown crime.

· Arthur & George are the solicitor George Edalji and the writer Arthur Conan Doyle, in Julian Barnes’ novel based on real events about a miscarriage of justice.

· A sharp and ambitious lawyer helps remake the world in A Place of Greater Safety by Hillary Mantel, in which Georges Jacques Danton’s role in the French Revolution is imagined.

· Matthew Shardlake is the lawyer-cum-investigator who features in the series of novels by C J Sansom, the first of which is Dissolution, set during the Tudor period in England, who is repeatedly and reluctantly embroiled in the nasty – and often lethal – politics of the royal court.

· Courtroom suspense abounds in Snow Falling on Cedars by David Guterson, in which a Japanese American man is charged with the murder of a local fisherman, bringing long-held prejudices to light.