Suburban Souls is the fictional autobiography of Jacky S., a middle-aged broker on the Paris bourse. In the last years of the nineteenth century he makes the acquaintance of Eric Arvel, a writer for the financial press who lives in the outer Paris suburbs at Sonis-sur-Marne. Arvel's house-hold consists of his mistress and the woman's adolescent daughter, Lilian, with whom the narrator falls in love. Though its sexual descriptions are more explicit, the novel has far more in common with the naturalism of Zola or Maupassant than with the pipe dreams of Edwardian erotica. The Parisian world of the 1890s, its cafes and railway stations, its metropolitan avenues and the semi-rural suburbs of brokers and entrepreneurs, are evoked by a suggestive impressionism appropriate to the age. The novel is more French than English. As so often with Carrington's publications it has the style of a book written in another language and then translated literally. There are such verbal oddities as the references to the Eastern Station in Paris, when even an Englishman would be more likely to recognize it as the Gare de l'Est.