{"id":8176,"date":"2019-12-12T07:25:12","date_gmt":"2019-12-12T07:25:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8176"},"modified":"2019-12-16T12:10:15","modified_gmt":"2019-12-16T12:10:15","slug":"a-stranger-city-by-linda-grant","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=8176","title":{"rendered":"A Stranger City by Linda Grant"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by Virago 2 May 2019<\/strong><\/p>\n

336pp, hardback, \u00a316.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

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Shortly before the UK\u2019s infamous Brexit referendum, an unknown woman (\u2018DB27\u2019, in police parlance) is buried in a pauper\u2019s grave.\u00a0 Fished from the Thames some months earlier, she has remained unidentified.\u00a0 No one has come forward to claim her.\u00a0 The scene is Dickensian, yet this is twenty-first-century London – seething, stressful, magnetic, and everlastingly mysterious.<\/p>\n

From this dramatic opening (based on a real-life anonymous drowning), Orange Prize winner Linda Grant has spun a story at once panoramic and intimate, and one full of atmosphere.\u00a0 A web of conscious and unconscious interconnections, layered like the often invisible levels of the city\u2019s transport system, links the dead woman with a cross-section of London\u2019s inhabitants.\u00a0 In particular, Chrissie, a young and reckless hospital nurse, who happens to go missing briefly on the same night as DB27; Alan, a film-maker, who makes a TV documentary about them; and Pete, the river-haunting policeman who tries to solve the case.<\/p>\n

Building on the private lives of these imaginary characters, Grant fills their neighbourhoods with a recognizable cast of polyglot supporting characters, many of whom have the mixed backgrounds now seen with such suspicion by British xenophobes. Then, having lulled the reader with warm-hearted realism, humour and occasional flights of fancy, she shifts the tone to something darker, a world in which deportation trains speed through the English countryside towards prison ships in the Thames estuary.\u00a0 There is even a reminder that London itself could drown.<\/p>\n

The mixture of tones is unsettling, as are the sharply observed aspirations of Grant\u2019s Londoners.\u00a0 A digitally savvy young man disfigured in a racially motivated acid attack commissions a golden mask and, for a while, becomes a hero; a schoolgirl narrowly escapes drowning by crazy twin sisters stuck in the past; a retired Persian merchant dreams of his days in the bazaar.\u00a0 The randomness of life\u2019s accidents is forcefully highlighted by the individual efforts and sensibilities she so carefully describes.<\/p>\n

As ever, from this writer, contemporary life is seen through personal histories and habits.\u00a0 Alongside her disquieting reminders of surveillance, terrorism and climate change, Grant shows her characters making the best of a city – and a country – bracing itself for the future.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

* A 2019 Notable Book<\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

A web of conscious and unconscious interconnections, layered like the often invisible levels of the city\u2019s transport system, links the dead woman with a cross-section of London\u2019s inhabitants. In particular, Chrissie, a young and reckless hospital nurse, who happens to go missing briefly on the same night as DB27; Alan, a film-maker, who makes a TV documentary about them; and Pete, the river-haunting policeman who tries to solve the case […] in Reviews<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-8176","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8176","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=8176"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8176\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":8282,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8176\/revisions\/8282"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=8176"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=8176"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=8176"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}