A Stranger City

Product Information

A. in English at MacMaster University, Hamilton, Ontario and did further post-graduate studies at Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada, where she lived from 1977 to 1984. I have to say I enjoyed the first half of the novel more than the second, which seemed to stray off-course with too many diversions and a rather jarring conclusion.

A documentary film-maker who ‘links’ stories by his film about the disappeared, the missing, in London. And as he says, pondering the “good city” on an elegiac boat trip down the Thames, “you couldn’t have London without foreigners…and “if you took a DNA test you found you were all sorts”. It is a Society that values success, entrepreneurial enterprise and its cultural status whilst able to glance over the heads of the disenfranchised, frowning on the lives of those who don’t quite make it. Linda Grant, an astute chronicler of social history in fact as well as fiction, is well placed to enliven this tradition.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. Strangers, passing in the night, with entwining stories are – a nameless suicide, a well-dressed woman, having thrown herself into the river.

K./Virago for an eARC via NetGalley of Linda Grant’s ‘A Stranger City’ in exchange for an honest review. Look at the Windrush generation; you see how people can lose their idea of where they belong overnight, It’s become possible to imagine all kinds of things happening. Several loosely overlapping characters and stories here, forming an overall celebration of the multi-cultural city of London and the opportunities it gives people to create new lives for themselves. This certainly isn’t a bad book; it’s just that for me it says nothing new, in spite of saying it very elegantly. However, the somewhat fractured style, for all its continuity, ultimately obstructs emotional investment.

The characters are brought together initially by the mystery surrounding an unidentified woman drowned in the Thames but, as is the way of city living, coincidences keep them bumping into each other. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.