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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 (P)2019 Hachette Audio UK Genre Fiction Literary Fiction Mystery Suspense Thriller & Suspense Fiction England

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All stars
Most relevant  
Absorbing, twisting weave of storylines; but the narrator?
Does nobody on the production team either know or care enough about pronunciation to correct her glaring errors?
Apparently we don’t ever use ‘thee’ any more, just ‘thuh’, ‘thuh’ and more ‘thuh’.
Irritating.

Sack the narrator!

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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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Enjoyed overall but didn't feel a close bond with the characters, not helped but a rather average narrator

Interesting

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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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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 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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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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Packed w believeable characters with extraordinary stories. Makes me nostalgic for pre-Brexit London. What an amazing city we were.

A great London tale

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I bought this on the basis of a review in a London newspaper. The review concluded that:

“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.”

While there are moments of humour, overall I found the novel to be very lacklustre. The characters lacked a distinct identity and the plot elements were challenging to follow. I persisted to the end, but not with a sense of expectation - more an attitude of “I’ve started so I’ll finish”.

I’ve Started So I’ll Finish

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Too much Brexit. As an immigrant Brexiteer, I really resent the way the reasons for it were portrayed.

Awful narrator who mis pronounced many non English words.

Love Grant usually. But not this one.

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