A Stranger City

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I was more compelled by the glimpses of the imagined future, as well as the dreamlike journey into the past. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other.

Contrast this with an England that seems to be retreating into itself, harking after the glory days of an Empire, capital punishment and boiled cabbage. In fact the genesis of the novel, Grant says, dates back to 1992, when, as a journalist, she attended the burial of an unknown woman drowned in the Thames. Linda Grant expresses her views through her characters resolutely and with passion, adding life to her characters and making it easier to envisage a sanitised future lacking much cultural diversity. There is a richness in this novel, found in a migrant experience that is deeply embedded rather than distinct from its environment. In this way, it follows on from a lot of other London novels, featuring a range of characters who come together in different ways and emphasising how important the city is in this.An apt title because her London is peopled with strangers; people that bump up against other strangers, come together and move on to meet with other strangers; strangers from different backgrounds, different status, different aspirations, different communities which are sometimes comprised of a hotchpotch of these varying strands of our society and sometimes a closed, rigid community relating, to race, class, religion or postcode. However, the somewhat fractured style, for all its continuity, ultimately obstructs emotional investment. The woven narratives evoke our urban patchwork - its autonomy and surprising intimacies, and I loved the way Grant vividly brought to life a multi-faceted London through deep observation of people and places that rang true. I really enjoyed A Stranger City a book that begins with a body in the Thames and with a bold nod at Dickens's Our Mutual Friend .

How could nobody in the whole metropolis of London not miss this young woman who threw herself, it is suspected, off a bridge? In this case its back to a twenty-first birthday party where, upstairs, away from the action, a terrible event occurred for one of the guests. It’s people like her character Pete, the policeman, says Grant, who “understand, who have that insight into modern London”.

Though the cynical might say that this ‘welcome’ has primarily happened when it suited us to do so for reasons of our own economic prosperity, rather than as a movement driven by compassion. The frame on which the novel hangs is the discovery of an unidentified young female body in the River Thames.

It’s a London book and it’s a book that is framed by immigration and the ongoing consequences of the UK referendum and the 52% majority in favour of leaving the EU. There needs to be a new word to describe this genre of modern literature - it's not exactly dystopian but authors place the setting in the near future with some potential horrors, usually the result of Brexit. I get the feeling, though, that I am being shown that London has always absorbed whoever came its way and would continue to do so. Some of the characters were well-drawn and I liked the interconnectivity between them which is probably the main reason I finished the book. I don't think Grant, like our politicians, fully understands the complexities behind people's decisions to vote leave.I even enjoyed the surreal/fantastic element of the island accessible by a secret tunnel/house and the peculiar persons living there. The book is supposed to be a celebration of diverse London confused by a post Brexit vote, but is too full of lazy steryotypes and decends via quite long boring passages about the river or weather into a vacuum of nothingness. I enjoyed the book and Grant's prose are good, but I was not as gripped as I might have been and I felt the story flagged in a couple of places. Grant interweaves multiple characters and their stories throughout, all in one way or another linking back to , and novel revolves around these two women, their friends, and their various difficulties in coming to their terms in the contemporary UK. Its diversity has demanded a plurality of voices, a polyphony you find from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales onwards.