A Stranger City, Linda Grant’s eighth novel, which begins with the burial of an unknown woman discovered in the Thames, is a portrait of the disparate but interconnected lives that make up contemporary London. Grant was born in Liverpool, but has lived in London for 34 years. She won the Orange prize for fiction in 2000 and was shortlisted for the Man Booker prize in 2008.
A Stranger City is all about how living in London has changed post-referendum, but the B-word only appears once at the very end. Would you describe it as a Brexit novel?
Yes. I started writing in September 2016 and certainly what was on my mind was what was going to happen, where were we heading? But I didn’t want to write about the politics of Brexit. I was thinking not so much about leaving the EU, but about the idea of home. Because London is a metropolis, because it is cosmopolitan and feels like a city state, I was thinking of what happens when that begins to crack and you start to wonder, is this really my home after all? What does home mean?
The book is extremely of the moment, with references to the London terror attacks in 2017 and so on. How did it feel to be writing almost in real time?
Very odd and very nerve-racking. I didn’t know where the novel would end up, because I never do, and obviously I had no idea where any of this was going. I tried to keep a very light hand on the tiller in terms of the politics, but I was mostly undermined by worrying that maybe it wouldn’t be all that bad, or maybe we wouldn’t leave after all and then I would look really stupid. But by the time I’d actually finished it, I thought it had all got a lot worse: the violence and xenophobia and the physical attacks. And of course, I couldn’t have anticipated the inability to pass a deal in parliament, and this sense of stress, the anxiety of uncertainty, that so many people are feeling.
One of the characters reflects that “It was impossible to tell London’s story; it was too large, too ancient... the place simply defied narration”. Why did you feel you could take it on?
I’ve always been very frightened about writing about London. If like Zadie Smith you have a very defined patch like NW, and you’ve grown up there, and you are a Londoner by birth it is much easier. But hardly anybody is a Londoner by birth any more. And always perching on your shoulder is Dickens, and Bleak House, which I did my MA thesis on.
London’s vastness was what I really wanted to convey, its sense of coincidence and interconnection, of chance and random meetings. I wanted to see it through different people’s eyes, including those who are peripatetic. I was very influenced by the 2011 documentary Dreams of a Life about a woman in her 30s who worked in the city whose body was only discovered three years after she had died. Her friends all said: “Well, I thought she’d just moved on.” That was really the catalyst for creating the character of Chrissie, somebody who moves from flatshare to flatshare.
At least 10 of the characters in this novel have come to London as immigrants. Why does exile feature so strongly in your fiction?
I always felt I couldn’t write the sort of Jewish novel that Naomi Alderman or Howard Jacobson were writing. It didn’t feel right. So I’ve always written about people who feel themselves to be displaced, a bit sort of Janus-like, looking in both directions. The character I most relate to in this novel is Francesca, who seems the most solidly established in the metropolitan middle class, but at the same time has all that anxiety and insecurity, and worries about what her parents and grandparents are going to think of her, and is constantly putting on a display.
Several of your novels share that sense of anxiety similar to that felt by Francesca’s immigrant Persian-Jewish family. Is it something you’ve experienced?
I was brought up with paranoia. My parents saw antisemitism everywhere. They said that if you marry a non-Jew, sooner or later he will call you a “dirty Jew”, that you have to stick in your own community, it’s a raging wilderness out there. But I didn’t buy it. I rejected that idea.
The novel also looks ahead, with some terrifying speculation about what might be in store for us, including extreme weather, deportation trains, prison ships and children being buried in paupers’ graves. Do you really feel the future is so bleak?
It’s about tomorrow as much as it’s about today. The children’s graves was taken from a newspaper report about parents not being able to afford to bury their children, cremating them in cardboard boxes and not getting back the ashes because they hadn’t been paid for. It’s real.
You are very active on social media and have described Twitter and Facebook as “cultural salons”, but the book seems to support the argument that it can be a threat to privacy and mental health.
One of my big anxieties was that in five years’ time, people will read it and say ‘What was Twitter? And Facebook?’ I’m certainly not attacking social media. For me Twitter sort of works. I quite enjoy it and I probably spend too much time on it. But it’s not fun if you are on the receiving end of one of those Twitter storms.
I became really fascinated by Twitter missing person appeals, in part because one of them concerned someone that my nephew knows. They are very minimal in their information. You never find out what the story was behind it.
Despite everything, do you still consider yourself an optimist?
I’m generally a fairly optimistic person, but I worry. I think it is probably because we are so bloody privileged that it feels so scary. We’re not used to feeling scared. My parents would have felt scared an awful lot.
On a lighter note, all your novels are highly attentive to fashion and the role of clothes in creating character. A Stranger City is no exception.
I hope people notice I’m much bigger on menswear this time. I was very interested in the way that young men have grown up to be much more clothes-conscious.
What’s the last great book you read?
Of real lasting stature? Then it’s Vasily Grossman’s Life and Fate, in which the violence of 20th-century history is mitigated by random acts of kindness.
Which novelists and nonfiction writers working today do you admire the most?
She’s written her last novel, but I’ve been reading Margaret Drabble since I was a teenager, from A Summer Bird-Cage to The Dark Flood Rises. I get such satisfaction from her mind working on the page.
Do you prefer to read on paper or a screen?
I was a Kindle early adopter because of the luxury of being able to change the size of the typeface and its introduction coincided with our local independent bookshop closing down, but now we have a Waterstones I’m back to print Paper, except when I’m travelling.
Which classic novel did you read recently for the first time?
I read Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain when I was researching my novel about tuberculosis, The Dark Circle. A daunting expedition but so funny and with such pathos.
Who is your favourite literary hero or heroine? Antihero or villain?
Becky Sharp, of course. A young woman on the make. Not what you’d call a likable character.
What kind of reader were you as a child? Which books and authors have stayed with you since childhood?
I was an only child until I was eight and there was no daytime TV, so I just read and read and read. I adored the Lorna Hill ballet books set around Sadler’s Wells and bought first editions of them a few years ago, which I reread every couple of years. They’re slightly glamorous and about girls who want careers in the arts.
What book did you expect to like and didn’t?
Middlemarch. God, the hectoring, lecturing, humourless authorial voice. Drives me mad.
What book do you always return to?
Anita Brookner’s Hotel du Lac, the perfect novel about romantic love and how the idea of it can shape or deform your whole identity.
What do you plan to read next?
I have a proof copy of Deborah Levy’s new novel, The Man Who Saw Everything. She is seriously good.
• A Stranger City by Linda Grant is published by Little,Brown on 2 May (£16.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
