A Stranger City

Product Information

For me London is busy (of course), diverse – certainly; and there are many different kinds of communities, but amongst all this there are many who strive to include those on the margins of society and to strengthen the sense of community – a more positive view. On London is run by Dave Hill, formerly the Guardian's award-winning London commentator, and written by him and an array of fellow Londoncentrics. The story expands, covering the lives of the detective in charge of the discovery, the film-maker and his wife, her immigrant grandparents, a nurse who happened to be on the bridge at the time the Jane Doe jumped, and her contacts and much more. Many of the subplots touch upon the theme of immigration today and how immigrants are (or are not) absorbed into London.

A connection exists between them, not a strong narrative link, just the haphazardness of life in action.

I don't think Grant, like our politicians, fully understands the complexities behind people's decisions to vote leave. In 2016 she began writing an account of that bleak day in a wintry East London cemetery, and at the same time overheard an ugly scene between a young man and young woman on a train into Moorgate from Alexandra Palace. Unsurprisingly, there's a lot of focus on Brexit and xenophobia resulting from it, as well as the idea of London as a place you might be born in, come to, or leave. She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M. S. Peter Dutton, who finds himself obsessed with identifying the drowned woman; Alan McBride, a documentary film-maker who at the instigation of Dutton creates a documentary about the woman, and Chrissie, an Irish nurse who was herself briefly a missing person.

Then there’s the nurse who was in the vicinity; she going on to disappear, as well, for a short time. 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. Linda Grant was born in Liverpool on 15 February 1951, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. The uncertainty of observation becomes a theme, perceptions and even realities changing with each point of view.Grant is interested in the encounters between her characters brought together through the concentrated population of the city and the time of intense change and speculation.

When I spotted, a few years later, ‘Upstairs at the Party’ in a remainder bin for a couple of bucks, I thought I’d give her another shot. Reviewer Jake Arnott, writing in the Guardian, describes this homage to an ever-evolving city, as being ‘. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. A Stranger City is Grant’s eighth and the first, she feels, that can truly be described as a London novel – not the city of native Londoners, but the London of so many people, like Grant herself, originally a Liverpudlian, who come from somewhere else.Those who are smart enough, able enough, want to move away from this increasingly hostile and ignorant society. The plot lines are quite a few, and so distinct but each and everyone of them is so fascinating and the author manages to connect them, interlaced them in a credible way that really worked for me. The only constant in identity is its unpredictability, and at the moment of a shocking hate crime even the exact nature of racial abuse becomes uncertain.