Snappy, if occasionally slow-paced, debut in which the moneyed ease
of a young woman's life is shattered when her entire family is
killed on an evening. Mia Taylor's family-her 20-year-old twin
sisters, Caitlin and Lara; her turning-30 younger brother
Ben-gather at her parents' home for a birthday celebration. By the
end, they are all dead (Lara will die the next morning) thanks to a
bomb that went off, presumably meant for a neighbor with a murky
relation to the troubles in Ireland. Unable to face the unrelenting
sympathy of well-wishers and friends, Mia leaves her well-paying,
influential government job and "goes East," where she finds work
managing an alternative medicine clinic. Rubbing shoulders with
street stragglers, immigrants, and a host of local eccentrics, Mia
is tracked down in her new life by Claude, a friend of her brother
Ben's, who tells her the truth behind her family's death. Ben, who
was involved in a high-level, multinational money-laundering
scheme, had been "skimming off the top" from his shady clients and
had paid the price for his hubris. Though Claude insists she leave
the past alone, Mia can't help but begin a search for her family's
killers, an inquiry that will lead her to one of London's leading
Muslim clerics by way of her former employer, Miles Anderton, a
comer in English politics. D'Ancona, deputy editor of the Sunday
Telegraph, has a sure grasp of the rich cultural, class, and ethnic
tapestry that makes up Mia's contemporary London, and this sense of
place is one of the story's signal strengths as Mia loses her
illusions, confronts hard truths, and is finally able to make a
bitter peace with her past. A lively and compelling portrait of the
city, while Mia, vividly drawn and engaging, meanders a half-step
too slowly toward a conclusion that's itself fresh and satisfying.
(Kirkus Reviews)
London can be as pitiless as it is bountiful. No one knows that
better than Mia Taylor. From a gilded life of privilege to a shabby
alternative health centre in London's East End in the space of
weeks. The violent tragedy that propels Mia east also pitches her
unwittingly into a bigger history, a modern legend of migration and
change. Mia's new life brings her into contact both with a
kaleidoscope of characters who inhabit the extraordinary city of
London and the burning issues that will mould its future. Politics
and racism, corruption and betrayal, poverty and decadence, all
smoulder side by side as the capital blazes into the new
millennium. Out of the ashes emerges Mia: a troubled, questing
woman who hopes to find herself by going east.
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