Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Jane Doe dies by suicide, jumping off a bridge and yet no one seems to know her. Despite this, her death touches and changes the lives of very different people including a police officer, nurse and a film maker.

I thought the premise for A Stranger City was interesting but it was hard to follow in some areas. Characters and subplots a plenty, it almost made me wish for a cheat sheet.

I did find Grant’s writing lyrical. In particular, I did like the way the city of London was almost introduced as an additional character.

Golden Grant and the Ebbs and Flows of London, her waters and her peoples

Linda Grant’s books are always potent, full of vitality and also of shadows and sorrows. And, also, celebrations of the wondrous diversity of cultures which can be found, particularly in cities, particularly in London. She also writes of the other side to that – the fear of ‘other’ which may be as much part of national psyche as the desire to welcome and give harbour to other, which also exists. Though the cynical might say that this ‘welcome’ has primarily happened when it suited us to do so for reasons of our own economic prosperity, rather than as a movement driven by compassion.

Published in 2019, A Stranger City documents the strange, uncomfortable awareness about ourselves which has been our lot since the Brexit vote.

I’m not altogether sure how comfortable a read this might be for those who voted Leave. This is not written from a point of understanding of them. And many of us still struggle to understand how what seemed so obviously to lack credibility – the sunlit uplands, the fictional windfalls, the have your cakery and eat it tooery – got believed.

This is a marvellous story, set both now, and in an – hopefully – imaginary – though one wonders – short future time when xenophobia unleashed loses ‘our United Kingdom’ to very Little Britain, a declined and mean nation

Strangers, passing in the night, with entwining stories are – a nameless suicide, a well-dressed woman, having thrown herself into the river. On that same night, a big hearted, exuberant Irish nurse, briefly ‘disappears’ but is found in part due to her online presence in a YouTube clip which went viral. The policeman who was called in to the discovery of the drowned woman, His wife, with a transformational life event, upending everything. A documentary film-maker who ‘links’ stories by his film about the disappeared, the missing, in London. His wife, third generation of Levantine culture, and the earlier generations of that family A very upwardly aspirational young man, in whose background is an earlier culture-assimilating-into-this-culture. London areas gentrifying from previous poverty, fashions up and down. Different diasporas from different times. Assimilated or not.

What is always evident in Grant’s writing, is its sheer vitality, her sure grasp of character and narrative drive. She is always writing about deep and important stuff, but is also, always primarily a teller of stories, rather than a polemicist forcing characters to bear the weight of authorial ideology

When a dead body is found in the Thames, caught in the chains of HMS Belfast, it begins a search for a missing woman and confirms a sense that in London a person can become invisible once outside their community - and that assumes they even have a community. A policeman, a documentary film maker and an Irish nurse named Chrissie all respond to the death of the unknown woman in their own ways.

This multi-stranded, thickly woven narrative recalls the intricate Persian carpets that are featured in one of the storylines.
London is portrayed in all its vari-faceted diversity – a kaleidoscope of race and class and culture, as the lives of the people we meet overlap or interconnect in one way or another. It loses its way slightly in the middle section, but overall is a thoughtful and intriguing read.

I'm not sure why it took me so long to get to this, but I am very glad I did. An excellent, ambitious novel of post-Brexit London, with a large cast of well-drawn characters, which is pleasingly edgy in places and beautifully observed: 'Summer was a dream. Autumn and winter are the natural condition of England.' Not everything comes off - a tip towards magical realism in the figures of the twins and the unsatisfying resolution of part of the unidentified body plot, for example - but this is another worthwhile London novel to read alongside Zadie Smith or Benardine Evaristo and probably equal to them. Almost great, definitely worth reading.

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.

This novel is a love letter to London in all its dark, dirty, strange and frightening glory. It starts when the body of an unidentified woman is pulled from Thames after she seemingly committed suicide by jumping off a bridge. Woven into the story are the narratives of numerous people who had a tenuous link to the woman, including a policeman and documentary maker who both become obsessed with discovering her identity and giving her some dignity in death.

Set during the era of ‘the vote’ (Brexit), the book also has a slightly dystopian feel, with immigrants being rounded up for deportation, and Grant holds a magnifying glass up to the small grudges and petty hostilities which were allowed to blossom as a result of the referendum.

With themes of identity, acceptance and hope, this very relevant and insightful story made for a very timely and interesting read.

I'm often wary of novels that are so explicitly political, but Linda Grant manages to integrate the key messages (and there are messages) so subtly into the novel that it's still enjoyable.

The characters are real and vivid - I felt I knew them.

“The Thames was an old lady with an expensive facelift and new clothes, robed in cloth-of-gold and ermine in the form of luxury apartments and Michelin-starred restaurants."


By chance I have been reading a few books recently in which the city of London, and the River Thames, could be considered to be major characters – fiction and non-fiction. Earlier this week I featured Caroline Crampton’s magical The Way to the Sea, a mixture of history, literature and memoir.

Today we have Linda Grant, one of my favourite authors, and her most recent novel.

The book starts uncompromisingly with the burial of an unknown woman whose body has been pulled from the Thames: no messing about. From there it moves back seven months to flit easily among a number of different characters, living a very real London life. It is not a gloomy book, but the life of London is definitely shown in all its hardships – the people who have to keep moving from one rental to another. (Young people in London say that they and everyone they know all move flats once a year – and that’s people with proper jobs, not those struggling on the edge.)

Grant has said that this is her Brexit novel, although it is only mentioned once by name:
The anti-Brexit marches they didn’t go on, the houses they didn’t buy and the one they did, the prizewinning novel she bought and left on the bedside table only half read, the petitions she signed without really reading them, the 34 degree London days and the 28 degree London nights, the new iPhone, the new dress, the new shoes, the dying trees in the streets, geraniums still flowering on Christmas Eve (‘the seasons are broken’), another election, a by-election, a new prime minister and me, me too…
Pretty much London life today, and pretty much an encapsulation of a state of the nation (and perhaps the world) novel. But you do need to read the whole book, with its wide range of people, its people who are immigrants and refugees, people who don’t fit into categories. Racism and terrorism play their part too.

Grant is so good at drawing a character in a few lines – often via their clothes:
Thinking back to your youth and how there’s no-one braver than a teenage working-class dandy in the age of punk with a few quid in his pocket to spend on clobber and records. The shirts he used to have! The beautiful shirts, the reckless T-shirt slogans, the Doc Martens, the drainpipe jeans.


[This Is actually Joe Strummer of The Clash, but he’ll do…]


There’s Francesca making nice with her future father-in-law
Francesca, whose mind was a clutter of florist’s flowers, expensive art books, shoes and hard-to-obtain French cheeses, was nervously attentive to his opinions about a range of subjects she knew nothing about. Fishing treaties, assisted dying, traffic-calming measures, food additives, penal reform – the usual blather of phone-ins. ‘Oh I see,’ she would say ‘How well you’ve explained it.’ Who wouldn’t be flattered?
One of the questions of the book is whether people are wholly alone, or whether they can make themselves into communities, even briefly. Francesca again:
Her sense of the atomisation of city life, the granular quality she had always taken for granted, people plotted on a map like stick-pins, was being replaced by clusters of which [they] were members without being aware of it, part of defined groupings of individuals unknown to them but with common purposes.
This reminded me of one of my favourite lines from Edith Wharton’s House of Mirth:
Such a vision of the solidarity of life had never before come to Lily… All the men and women she knew were like atoms whirling away from each other in some wild centrifugal dance: her first glimpse of the continuity of life had come to her that evening….
And this next passage reminded me of Caroline Crampton’s book The Way to the Sea, as mentioned above:
He remembered his lovely Thames, her steady inexorable purpose, how she was a watery road through the city, how the Spanish Armada had tried to sail up her and been repelled, how in that film he’d seen Sir Thomas More was rowed home from visiting the King at Hampton Court, how the river brought the plague and how it had become so polluted by industry it nearly died. The coal barges, the sailing ships, the great steel barrier out at Greenwich (beautiful sight in the sunshine), and the bridges, twenty from Tower to Kew.
Grant always has marvellous clothes:


She stood there in off duty clothes jeans and a little sequinned crop top and her hair piled high on her head and pinned with velvet bloody butterfly bows


There’s the woman in a navy dress with pearls… who also wears an emerald coat with dyed fur collar.








And the man with long white hair tied back in a ponytail, wearing plum




This one is Karl Lagerfeld.

I think Linda Grant is a wonderful writer, and although she has won awards she doesn’t get the attention she deserves. This book is a most marvellous London book and should be better-known as such.

There are many more of her books on the blog, and in particular the previous novel, Dark Circle, is one I did as part of a whole succession of books set in sanatoria, from Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain onwards.

One of the characters in this book is reading The Garden of the Finzi Continis by Giorgio Bassani, a great favourite on the blog.

Clemence Dane’s post-war theatrical saga, The Flower Girls, was on the blog recently: the London setting is a key element in that book too.


Top picture is a Thames sunset panorama from Wikimedia Commons, "Photo by DAVID ILIFF. License: CC BY-SA 3.0"

A dead woman who no one claims .Linda Grant has written another multi layered haunting novel.#netgalley#littlebrownuk

A well written, multi layered novel. Linda Grant has a free flowing, descriptive style that really immerses you in the scene. A very gritty storyline- a woman is found dead in the river Thames. Nobody has reported her missing and nobody comes forward. A police officer and documentary maker join forces to try to piece together the mystery of the woman. A gritty novel- I really enjoyed it.

I found this book interesting, it’s about London and how it is being gentrified. A police officer and a documentary maker join together to make a film about a missing woman. This is the core of the story but it also tells how difficult and expensive it is to live in London.

A Stranger City by Linda Grant centres on the discovery of a body of an unidentified woman whom no-one has reported missing.

A personally very resonant book as a “migrant” in Brexit Britain. Grant put her finger on the pulse of how different strangers experience alienation and integration

Another intriguing book from Linda Grant. Great characterisation and a multi layered plot keeps the reader guessing.

I have long been a fan of Linda Grant’s writing, so started this with enthusiasm. Was it sustained, though?

The funeral of an unknown woman is taking place as this book opens; her body has been fished out of the River Thames, an apparent suicide from jumping of London Bridge. One of the policeman involved in the enquiry into her death and identification becomes obsessed about the apparent lack of relatives coming forward. Next we meet a producer of television documentaries; he and the policeman discuss the idea of making a programme about the woman. Random characters are drawn together in this book which is much about London as the people who inhabit it.

Much as I loved the first half of the book, Grant’s writing has a wonderful, descriptive, flowing style, I felt my enthusiasm waning, and I can’t really put my finger on any particular reason. Maybe the cramming of so much into one novel – drugs, Brexit, terrorist attacks, acid attacks – felt just too much.

I’ve put this aside for now, but I won’t give up on it just yet. I’ll go back to it in a couple of months and perhaps edit this review if appropriate.

Set in London the novel begins with a poignant yet ordinary scene of the funeral of an unknown woman pulled from the Thames and then fans out into the lives of Pete, the policeman who is trying to identify her and Alan, who wants to make a film about her. Set against the uncertainties of Brexit the story enters the labyrinth of London introducing a broad cast of characters each with their complex and precarious lives. Londoners of all ages, backgrounds and cultures permeate the novel in a seemingly haphazard way against the backdrop of uncertainty created by the political turmoil of the times. Overall the loosely overlapping characters and their stories form a celebration of multi-cultural London but at times I found the structure to be fractured, often disjointed and the conclusion jarring and unsatisfying. An intriguing and thought-provoking depiction of contemporary times but it didn’t really get under my skin.

A woman is found dead- in Thames. London itself is a character in this book, let me say.
I think overall the story was OK. But the pace is very, very slow. It takes time to figure out what goes on and I was on the brink of losing interest when it did in the end. I would definitely read Grant again, as the writing is beautiful, but there's something missing in this book for me to enjoy it beyond 3 stars.

I have read too many novels centred around dead women. Some good, some bad. Some which see the dead women as human, some which see them as props to propel lacklustre white men's stories forward. And, after all this time, I have begun to realise just how much those two factors are connected. In A Stranger City, it does not take a rocket-scientist to realise just how little respect the dead woman is going to be afforded; she was a real person, within the limits of the novel anyway, and so she should not be reduced to the weird, fetishised role that she has been given. And honestly, I can't believe, in 2019, people are still writing women like this.

Linda Grant's latest novel begins with the death of an unknown young woman. Her body is found caught up in the chains of the HMS Belfast in the London Thames, No one knows who she is, where she is from - her story in unknown. The book follows people who are linked to her, either directly (the detective investigating her death) or indirectly, the wife of the man making a documentary about her.

I just could not gel with this at all. I read about 67% but found it disjointed and confusing. Every time I picked it back up I had to flick back a few pages to work out where I was and which character I was with.

I have never read Linda Grant before and while I enjoyed her prose the story could not hold my attention. I'm sure this says more about me as a reader than Grant as a writer. I just couldn't finish it.