City of the Mind

In London’s changing heartland, architect Matthew Halland is constantly aware of the past and the present blending together. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years of his daughter Jane and the failed marriage that he has almost put behind him. Here too is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But Matthew is occupied with constructing a new future for London in Docklands, and with it he begins to forge new, fragile yet hopeful, beginnings of his own. Lives connect and intersect in a web of connections, random and mysterious, in one of Penelope Lively’s most evocative novels.