The body affects only a few people, but in different ways, and from there the narrative weaves around their lives, as London's recent past unfurls and then moves into the near future. Contrast this with an England that seems to be retreating into itself, harking after the glory days of an Empire, capital punishment and boiled cabbage. 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. A documentary film-maker who ‘links’ stories by his film about the disappeared, the missing, in London.

Random characters are drawn together in this book which is much about London as the people who inhabit it. This is another London novel, another Brexit novel even, but also a character-focused narrative that is more about people than geography.Grant chooses brief chapters about significant events that involve strangers or those people who are flatmates who may never recognise each other in the street years later. She first came to London in 1976 after English Literature at York university, “dossing on a university friend’s sofa in Belsize Park for six months”, before continuing her studies in Canada.

She creates an unsettling picture of a country (or rather a portion of its people) rejecting cultural diversity. How all our lives intersect and how coincidence or the randomness of birth place can decide how we live and with whom.

Reviewer Jake Arnott, writing in the Guardian, describes this homage to an ever-evolving city, as being ‘. And Dickens is one of the first modernists,” she adds, citing Bleak House, with its unreliable narration, different points of view, different tenses, capturing her sense of the disconnection of London, “operating on coincidence. London is less visceral than in some books, the catalyst for relationships rather than a player itself, and this will suit readers who are interested in a novel that doesn't delve into London itself but looks at people, home, and coincidence.

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. Published in 2019, A Stranger City documents the strange, uncomfortable awareness about ourselves which has been our lot since the Brexit vote. These three characters drift in and out of the narrative in a rather fragmented way and, when the young woman's identity is eventually discovered, it happens through a very odd coincidence which I found hard to believe.

It, claims Ms Grant, is partly autobiographical – and proves that she is an author certainly worth reading, with this or ‘We Had It So Good’ obvious starting points. 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. the real achievement of A Stranger City is the way in which its narrative is as fractured and uncertain as the London it portrays. London is portrayed in all its vari-faceted diversity – a kaleidoscope of race and class and culture, as the lives of the people we meet overlap or interconnect in one way or another.