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WINNER OF THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020 `A superb piece of writing about London life. Past Wingate winners include Zadie Smith, Amos Oz and David Grossman' '[A] shimmering new novel . . . Grant's book is as much a love letter to London as a lament, an ode to pink skin after sunny days and lost gloves waving from railings' The Economist 'A compelling portrait of contemporary London, it's a novel fit for shifting, uncertain times' Suzi Feay, Financial Times 'A Stranger City feels like a very important novel for right now: no politically ponderous diatribe but a witty, sunlounger-accessible and deeply humanising story about people - about us - and the societal shipwreck we're stuck in' Evening Standard When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community - and that assumes they even have a community. 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. London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many. The film-maker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives - or do they? An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate - or have they? The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.… (more)
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The initial
All of this sounds promising, but instead I found the book simply disjointed and annoying. London itself emerges as more than merely backdrop to its inhabitants’ lives, but its impact was not enough to rescue the novel.
"For without the prop of a passport a person is a disembodied ghost.
Francesca’s grandparents had British passports. It was unthinkable for them not to have secured their paperwork. Uncle Farki’s son in California had two, which was considered by the family to be the absolute minimum for a secure life. Younis had told his son to make approaches to Israel but his wife Hilary did not like the country and had ‘views’. She was, he said, ‘a bit of a petition signer’."
To tell the story of change, Grant pulls together a community around a lost woman, pulled out of the Thames without any id. Her disappearance becomes a film, a compassionate police officer becomes a little obsessed with her. Another woman goes missing but turns out to have been just having a romantic encounter: her flatmate raises a twitter storm. A man loses his partner when he can't get over his PTSD from a terrorist bomb. Another man is hit by a racist acid attack. For some the changes are insurmountable: for the young, it seems possible to pick up and start again, whether in a new country or with a new business.
I think I still associate London with being in my 20s and thinking so much was possible, that anyone was welcome unlike the small town where I had lived before. Clearly that was naive, and this book suggests that even that appearance of welcome is disappearing, and future Londoners should approach with caution.
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823.92 |