The great Anglo-Saxon scholar the Venerable Bede called it an “emporium for many nations who come to it from land and sea”, and that was in AD731, when the English were the newcomers. London has always been a multicultural city. Instead the unidentified body provides a curious touchstone to a broad cast of characters, provoking them to confront their own sense of self, so that the “stranger” in the title oscillates between noun and comparative adjective. The newly retired cop Pete knows that police work “isn’t all clues and puzzles like you read in books or see on the telly”.
A Stranger City is a mystery of sorts, but certainly not the genre kind. A documentary film crew records the burial of an unknown woman pulled out of the Thames seven months earlier, a police detective who worked on her case arrives just too late for her interment, and we enter a labyrinth of stories set in contemporary London, where identity and uncertainty go hand in hand.
