A Stranger City by Linda Grant, Hachette
London is put under a menacing microscope in this powerful evocation of the lives of ordinary people in the sprawling city today.. Chrissie misses Dublin’s Liffey River. DS Dutton dotes on “his lovely Thames”, so the woman who drowned is now also inside him; his cancer-stricken wife changing into someone he doesn’t know. Alan’s wife’s Persian grandparents have been here for 40 years, but sense racism rising. They now only speak Farsi in bed. The neighbours still complain of their cooking. They once lived in a villa; now exiled to a bedsit. “The country is being emptied of its unwanted population … This was what it meant to be thrown off the edge of the world.” Widowed, lonely Younis watches TV for company, where “people express dangerous thoughts”.
