A Stranger City

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These three characters drift in and out of the narrative in a rather fragmented way and, when the young woman's identity is eventually discovered, it happens through a very odd coincidence which I found hard to believe. Reviewer Jake Arnott, writing in the Guardian, describes this homage to an ever-evolving city, as being ‘.

London may seem to defy narration – “too large, too ancient, too many layers”, as a character in Linda Grant’s new novel A Stranger City suggests – but the novel’s powerful portrait of the city proves the opposite. That’s appropriate for such a contemporary novel reflecting the unknowable outcome of a country in flux.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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The writing is excellent, and the wonderfully disparate characters recognisable, and so well rounded as to become extremely real. There's warmth and heart here in her cast of characters and the way a group of strangers is linked by the fate of a woman who got lost.

Against Smith’s stunningly clever wordplay and the depth of her characters, Linda Grant comes out second best.A Stranger City is centred on the imagined enclave of Wall Park, below the North Circular, though readers familiar with Bowes Park, Myddleton Road and the New River will recognise the neighbourhood. Grant builds A Stranger City, her most recent novel, around the discovery of an unidentified young woman found drowned in the Thames, about whom no missing person report was filed, and the media frenzy around the short term disappearance of an Irish woman of roughly similar age. Francesca, a bourgeois art-history graduate, has Persian Jewish grandparents, refugees from the Iranian revolution who whisper Farsi to each other only in the safety of their bed. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006.