The novel takes the reader to post-Brexit London where a woman has killed herself by jumping off a bridge. No one has come forward to identify her. The book explores a whole host of people who are connected to the suicidal woman by the most tenuous of strings. A police officer who can't stop thinking about her case. A nurse who was on the bridge simultaneously, yet unaware of the tragedy taking place. A filmmaker who creates a documentary about the jumper. For each of these people, we meet the people in their lives - family or friends or neighbors. This structure (sort of a hub, spoke, wheel approach) makes for a LOT of characters and a lot of subplots. Many of the subplots touch upon the theme of immigration today and how immigrants are (or are not) absorbed into London.

I was alternatively impressed and frustrated by this book. Grant's writing style is right up my alley. Her descriptions are outstanding, freshly rendered, and compelling in their own right. In this case, the book is set in London, and the author makes London come alive for the reader. She almost makes it seem like a character itself. She describes it: "There's nothing one could do that would provoke its surprise. It absorbed atrocities, shrugged them off . . .nobody talked to each other or made eye contact on the tube; like an elephant bitten by a mosquito, London was simply too big, too absorbed in its own individual business, too intent on getting to work and going shopping and having dates and affairs and planning robberies." Her prose made me think.

And it was a good thing it did, because the plot - such as it was - really lacked suspense. It was very fragmented. I felt I kept forgetting who the characters were (omg, I wish I had read this on Kindle where revisiting character info is 10x easier) and had to remind myself repeatedly of who they were and who they were related to. One character had two names to add to the complications. In addition, there were some pretty surreal moments that require the reader to puzzle out what has actually happened and more importantly why. I questioned if certain scenes were meant to be metaphorical. At any rate, I don't mind doing some of the work as a reader, but I felt the balance was tipped away from my favor and not in a good way.

To Grant's credit, she saved the situation a bit in the end with a relative straightforward recitation of what happened to each character, and I did appreciate that . . .in fact, it almost pushed me to give the book another star.

( )

An explosion of characters mostly living and residing in London, many immigrant and immigrant descendants, most of whose lives have been touched in some way by the discovery of a body of a woman found in the Thames. London is the Stranger City, and these on some levels are some of its strangers, but also some of the characters find themselves to be strangers to themselves and at times their loved ones. Is the City also a stranger to its nation (post-Brexit vote) and to its union with Europe? ( )

I like Linda Grant's writing, so was pleased to get this ARC. I didn't realise it was a Brexit novel, but it makes sense given her interest in migration, Jewish histories and time. I found it really hard to read though, because it seemed so bleak about the future of London. At its core is the perceived decline of acceptance for the many different groups of people who have made London their home, taking Brexit and ultimately wondering where authoritarian programmes might lead.
"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. ( )

I had great expectations for this book, having enjoyed a couple of Linda Grant’s novels in the past, and was, therefore, exited when I saw a stack of signed copies on offer in Daunt Books. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm seems to have been misplaced, and I found myself very disappointed.

The initial premise certainly seemed to work, dealing with a pauper’s burial of a woman whose unclaimed and unidentified body had been recovered from the Thames. The story then goes off at various tangents, following a selection of different characters with tenuous (mostly extremely tenuous) connections to the dead woman. Among these is the story of another young woman on her way to a party with her flatmate. When, utterly without provocation, makes a horrible remark to her, she decides not to accompany him to the party, and instead spends the summer evening walking around the London Bridge area. The story then moves to a young man who witnessed their disagreement, and finds himself wondering how their evening ended, and what the consequences of the sudden act of nastiness by the flatmate.

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. ( )