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A Stranger City

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She was educated at the Belvedere School (GDST), read English at the University of York, completed an M. For me, the London thing has been done to death (and I live in London), Ali Smith, Jonathan Coe and others have written novels about Britain and Brexit and I just got bored with A Stranger City. Brexit Britain is explored through the brilliant connectivity of seemingly unrelated characters - each facing their own difficulties, aspirations and regrets - whose stories are synchronised by the discovery of an unidentified body.

I didn’t feel I knew enough, I didn’t have the right – unlike Liverpool, where I felt I had a deep understanding of what that city was about.

In 2016 she began writing an account of that bleak day in a wintry East London cemetery, and at the same time overheard an ugly scene between a young man and young woman on a train into Moorgate from Alexandra Palace. S. Peter Dutton, who finds himself obsessed with identifying the drowned woman; Alan McBride, a documentary film-maker who at the instigation of Dutton creates a documentary about the woman, and Chrissie, an Irish nurse who was herself briefly a missing person.

The 2016 “Brexit” decision has also brought about a more open hostility towards outsiders, and in A Stranger City (as the title indicates) hostility is present in London as well as in the wider UK. The interconnectivity of each perspective makes for a sinuous and fluid tale, reminiscent of the river around which the city revolves. An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate – or have they? The copper investigating the fatal incident had no leads and is troubled by that; a documentary film maker, who just happened to be producing a series on missing persons, included her story. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.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 . A Stranger City is Grant’s eighth and the first, she feels, that can truly be described as a London novel – not the city of native Londoners, but the London of so many people, like Grant herself, originally a Liverpudlian, who come from somewhere else. Then it concerns itself with exaggerated racial tensions: acid attacks, people avoiding going out, other leaving London to go back home, deportations. She creates an unsettling picture of a country (or rather a portion of its people) rejecting cultural diversity.

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