Londoners: The Days and Nights of London Now - as Told by Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Left it and Long for it - Softcover

Craig Taylor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1847083293 ISBN 13: 9781847083296

Publisher: Granta Publications Ltd, 2012

Synopsis

Here are the voices of London - rich and poor, native and immigrant, women and men - witnessed by Craig Taylor, an acclaimed journalist, playwright and writer, who spent five years exploring the city and listening to its residents. From the woman whose voice announces the stations on the London Underground to the man who plants the trees along Oxford Street; from a Pakistani currency trader to a Guardsman at Buckingham Palace - together, these voices and many more, paint a vivid, epic and wholly fresh portrait of Twenty-First Century London.

About this title

Review:

"A splendid oral history of the city... On occasions Londoners attains a level of eloquence as beautiful and blue as anything to be found in the works of Jean Rhys or Samuel Selvon ... A remarkable volume" -Guardian

"Craig Taylor tunes in to the multi-tongued, self-justifying noise of the streets. And he leaves us with a substantial account, not just of our imaginary riverside capital, but, more vividly, of himself: as inquirer, investigator, part of a long and valuable lineage"-Iain Sinclair, Observer

"Londoners must be 2011's most ambitious and creative book about London ... This is a book to deepen your relationship with London and make you fall in - or out - of love with it all over again ... I can't tell you how much I enjoyed it" - Evening Standard

"Memorable, funny and occasionally melancholy... a rich, satisfying tapestry of metropolitan life" - Sunday Times

"Ranging from the shocking to the poignant, 80 London voices produce a vivid collage of this impossible city" - Independent

"A cacophonous testimony to the multiple lives of the capital... all life is here in all its dirty, exuberant glory" --Metro

"Its brilliance lies not in the way Taylor frames the concept but in the way he lets people talk without obvious motive or direction. Five stars." --Time Out

"Craig Taylor is the real deal: a peerless journalist and a beautiful craftsman. He'd be a household name already if he wasn't so modest. He'll be one anyway in due course." --David Rakoff, bestselling author of "Fraud" and "Half Empty"

From the Back Cover:

Five years in the making, Londoners is a fresh and compulsively readable view of one of the world's most fascinating cities--a vibrant narrative portrait of the London of our own time, featuring unforgettable stories told by the real people who make the city hum.

Acclaimed writer and editor Craig Taylor has spent years traversing every corner of the city, getting to know the most interesting Londoners, including the voice of the London Underground, a West End rickshaw driver, an East End nightclub doorperson, a mounted soldier of the Queen's Life Guard at Buckingham Palace, and a couple who fell in love at the Tower of London--and now live there. With candor and humor, this diverse cast--rich and poor, old and young, native and immigrant, men and women (and even a Sarah who used to be a George)--shares indelible tales that capture the city as never before.

Together, these voices paint a vivid, epic, and wholly original portrait of twenty-first-century London in all its breadth, from Notting Hill to Brixton, from Piccadilly Circus to Canary Wharf, from an airliner flying into London Heathrow Airport to Big Ben and Tower Bridge, and down to the deepest tunnels of the London Underground. Londoners is the autobiography of one of the world's greatest cities.

About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Publications Ltd
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 1847083293
• ISBN 13: 9781847083296
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 448