Linda Grant is author of five non-fiction books and seven novels. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. The Dark Circle was shortlisted for the 2017 Women's Prize for Fiction. Her latest novel, A Stranger City, was published in 2019. Linda Grant lives in London. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the University of York and John Moores University.
Grant is superb on London life, which is at once atomised and seen
as a web of unlikely connections. However, as her by turns humorous
and horrifying tale circles and deepens, her deft peeling back of
the capital's layers raises increasingly unsettling questions about
where all of us might be heading
*Daily Mail*
[A] shimmering new novel . . . Grant's book is as much a love
letter to London as a lament, an ode to pink skin after sunny days
and lost gloves waving from railings
*The Economist*
The novel is fleet-footed . . . Londoners of all ages, backgrounds
and hues throng the novel . . . The plot's seemingly haphazard
quality mirrors the contingency of urban life but the way Grant
makes even the minor characters flare into life gives the novel
richness and depth. A compelling portrait of contemporary London,
it's a novel fit for shifting, uncertain times
*Financial Times*
Grant conveys how these sentiments affect her individuals with
insightful emotional accuracy
*Sunday Times*
This is no weighty, state-of-the-nation tome to be struggled
through. Grant tackles Brexit, terrorism, acid attacks, racism,
social media, climate change - every headline which daily sends
seismic shudders through London - with the lightest of touches.
This is a book to whizz through breathlessly. And to laugh at.
There are great deadpan vignettes . . . Grant is a piercing analyst
of relationships too (her Austen-like knack for narratorial irony
is particularly delicious when dissecting Alan and Francesca's
early romance). Such humour serves only to emphasise the disturbing
storyline. Invented events (terrorist van-rammings, weeks of snow,
mass deportations) are disorientingly plausible, and Grant's London
develops into a dystopia. At least, dystopia as I'm writing this -
who knows how prescient her plot twists may be? A Stranger City
feels like a very important novel for right now: no politically
ponderous diatribe but a witty, sunlounger-accessible and deeply
humanising story about people - about us - and the societal
shipwreck we're stuck in
*Evening Standard*
Stranger City is a lush love letter to London that asks questions
about what cost Brexit will have on [Grant's] adopted city and its
diverse inhabitants . . . the history and ideas about what makes a
city tick tumble out of her pen, and she draws her characters with
a realist's attention to detail
*The Times*
[A] stunning novel . . . Grant weaves together lots of intricate
strands into a meaningful, poignant tale about the loneliness and
randomness of big-city life
*Good Housekeeping*
There's a Dickensian quality to the opening scene of Grant's
seventh novel, yet it's one of the most bitingly contemporary
publications of the year - a shifting, polyphonic narrative that
seamlessly braids terrorism, climate change, racism, social media
and, of course, Brexit
*Mail on Sunday*
There is a richness in this novel, found in a migrant experience
that is deeply embedded rather than distinct from its environment.
Everyone has a complex heritage; even comfortable, integrated lives
seem precarious . . . the real achievement of A Stranger City is
the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the
London it portrays. And despite its contemporary relevance, the
novel avoids becoming a "state of the nation" tract - it's far too
emotionally intelligent for that. It's as much a novel of feelings
as ideas, and this is what makes it a compelling read
*Guardian*
One of the great novels about London. Unsparing about what makes it
ugly, cold-hearted, fractured; but also a hymn of love, full of
characters so generously, so compassionately portrayed. And, of
course, it's beautifully written
*@holland_tom*
I really enjoyed A Stranger City a book that begins with a body in
the Thames and with a bold nod at Dickens's Our Mutual Friend. This
is a dangerous London of bristling present and haunting future, in
which nothing is quite as it seems and everyone has a past that may
stretch tolerance or demand surveillance. It's a gripping read
*Tablet*
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