A Stranger City

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At one point Francesca goes through a passageway under an aqueduct and enters the Island, a “geographical anomaly” occupied by the families of council waste operatives, with a retired circus elephant stabled in a lock-up garage. Those who are smart enough, able enough, want to move away from this increasingly hostile and ignorant society. But anyhow don't be fooled, deportations are decreasing in the UK, and I've actually been shocked to see the high number of Romanians being deported. The central plot, such as it is, revolves around the discovery of a body of an unidentified woman whom no-one has reported missing, and a woman who is reported missing with a lot of social media fuss at the same time, but is discovered to be fine a couple of days later.

Grant is superb on London life, which is at once atomised and seen as a web of unlikely connections. Unsparing about what makes it ugly, cold-hearted, fractured; but also a hymn of love, full of characters so generously, so compassionately portrayed. Though never directly mentioned, Brexit is the spectre that haunts this novel, and it’s clear which side of the debate the author is on.People are always looking and holding their phones up and you’re being seen,” reflects Chrissie, an Irish nurse who goes missing on the same night as the dead woman. Grant’s richly-drawn characters certainly don’t seem to either (now there’s verisimilitude for you) and although incompetent politicians inevitably cast their shadow across the novel, the focus rarely wavers from the inner and immediate outer lives of each character. Much as I loved the first half of the book, Grant’s writing has a wonderful, descriptive, flowing style, I felt my enthusiasm waning, and I can’t really put my finger on any particular reason. Visually, they are distinct: the author's deep interest in fashion makes sure of that and her descriptions are vivid.

for me - couldn’t make up my mind about it as at times I found it confusing and disjointed- but perhaps that was the point. The plot's seemingly haphazard quality mirrors the contingency of urban life but the way Grant makes even the minor characters flare into life gives the novel richness and depth. An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate – or have they?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. In addition, there were some pretty surreal moments that require the reader to puzzle out what has actually happened and more importantly why. but in the context of this work, set against the Brexit backdrop, which explores the tenuous nature of identity and the speed with which it can evaporate, the mighty cast of colourful and confusing characters and their stories is tolerable. 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. The funeral of an unknown woman is taking place as this book opens; her body has been fished out of the River Thames, an apparent suicide from jumping of London Bridge.

This is a political book about Brexit and depending on the political persuasion of the reader likely to promote strong polarisation of like/dislike. A policeman, a documentary film-maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many.Here again she has incorporated social issues through the interlinked lives of her characters and produced a very readable novel. Grant is pondering a “speculative future” about what could be though – “it’s not a prediction” – and the novel remains rooted in feeling and experience not politics – a celebration of London’s openness and possibilities, it’s “mouth wide open to the sea”, as much as it strikes a warning note about where we are now. The copper investigating the fatal incident had no leads and is troubled by that; a documentary film maker, who just happened to be producing a series on missing persons, included her story. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. A Stranger City is centred on the imagined enclave of Wall Park, below the North Circular, though readers familiar with Bowes Park, Myddleton Road and the New River will recognise the neighbourhood.

For me, the London thing has been done to death (and I live in London), Ali Smith, Jonathan Coe and others have written novels about Britain and Brexit and I just got bored with A Stranger City. Random characters are drawn together in this book which is much about London as the people who inhabit it.And then it all went horribly wrong, with a bleak and exaggerated view of Brexit and the resulting zenophobic violence. With a corpse in London’s river as its starting point, A Stranger City makes a bold reference to Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, with watery themes of depths and shallows. It’s a panoramic, sometimes discursive account of contemporary London – a city of strangers – and while the shadow of Brexit and its accompanying pervasive anxiety – the city becoming stranger – hangs over the story, it manages to use the B word only once.