2007-04-26 A riveting blend of fiction and social history

This is an extraordinary novel, if 'novel' is the right word to describe a sequence of interconnected chapters that narrate the lives of some of the past and present inhabitants of Brick Lane in East London: pre-Romans, Romans, Danish invaders, Polish Jews and homesick Bangladeshis all make their appearances in this complex narrative sequence that plays with time, place and literary genres in sometimes disorienting ways.

Gavron has clearly done a vast amount of research, but his invocations of the wide array of lives lived over the centuries on this 'acre of barren ground' are never weighed down by the historical details, and in spite of the book's episodic structure, the narrative tension is maintained right until the end. Brilliant: 10/10.