276°
Posted 20 hours ago

A Stranger City

£9.9£99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

In the novel, the young woman becomes Chrissie, an Irish nurse who coincidentally goes briefly missing at the same time as the unidentified woman ends her life jumping from London Bridge, and becomes something of a calm centre connecting a disparate cast list of modern Londoners. I didn’t feel I knew enough, I didn’t have the right – unlike Liverpool, where I felt I had a deep understanding of what that city was about. A dead body found in the Thames is the starting point for this thoughtful and perceptive novel about identity, community, dislocation, immigration and the idea of home and belonging. 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. About half way the novel, Grant introduces quasi-magical realism which is unnecessary and devalues the investment reader makes in the characters and plot.

Ultimately the message is we are all different, with our different origins, our different stories, yet we all come together to form something that is way bigger than we are! You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. 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. A wonderful exploration of what it means to be anonymous and alone in a city thronging with people, A Stranger City at once preserves the timeless Britishism of modern London whilst celebrating its cosmopolitan and multicultural nature. However, Grant adds special deportation night trains that bring out the rats into the nearby houses, causing me to wonder where the fictional parts of this story ended.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.

Reviewer Jake Arnott, writing in the Guardian, describes this homage to an ever-evolving city, as being ‘. I certainly enjoyed the book and wanted to keep turning the pages, but overall was a little underwhelmed by it. She creates an unsettling picture of a country (or rather a portion of its people) rejecting cultural diversity. At its heart is the need for belonging, something we all share yet can put us at odds with each other.Perhaps it's an intentional bit of meta-commentary on making connections in London that we only get to know the main characters as one-dimensional stereotypes. The city itself is a storyteller, with urban myths that feed off the paranoia of a collective unconscious, and topographical digressions that take us into the realm of the absurd. We have such a colorful palette of characters: so different, each with their own quirks yet they all come together to form this vibrant city.

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.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.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment