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A Stranger City

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A Stranger City

By: Linda Grant
Narrated by: Olivia Dowd
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About this listen

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.  

London is a place of random meetings, shifting relationships - and some, like Chrissie intersect with many.  

The filmmaker and the policeman meanwhile have safe homes with wives - or do they?  

An immigrant family speaks their own language only privately; they have managed to integrate - or have they?  

The wonderful Linda Grant weaves a tale around ideas of home; how London can be a place of exile or expulsion, how home can be a physical place or an idea. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.

©2019 Linda Grant Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction England
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A kaleidoscopic style of writing which I grew increasingly unable to follow, and finally abandoned. Although rich in detail, the text was read like a scramble of bullet points.

Disappointing

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A novel that gently tips you onto the edge of surreal then back to reality, like passing from a waking to a dream state and back. It’s peopled with likeable characters that you care about. On the surface you might mistake the book as a police mystery novel but that is only one of its layers. I’ve both read and then listened to this novel as I needed it twice, probably because although it has dystopian flashes, like deportation trains running through the night, I didn’t want to leave the characters.

Absorbing, literary, great, expansive and localised.

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The book is as good as you'd expect from Linda Grant. The narration is mostly quite good but there's annoying mispronunciation of words like chutzpah and apropos, which she or the producers could easily have checked - also her affectation of Haitch for H, which doesn't fit her accent.

worth listening to

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A fascinating, kaleidoscopic and wide- ranging book where perspectives conjoin to create the multi- faceted view of the city. The narrator, however, is most irritating with her frequently mid- pronounced words. How did this get past the editors?

B-road scope - but narrator, check your pronunciation!

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Tangible, tragic and varied fragments of lives lived in London and England under the shadow of Brexit.

Tale of Brexit

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