Instead I got a rather simple yet tender story, without much action at all (to the point that it did lose me for a little while about a third of the way through), but full of heart, grief and humanity.Ĭharacters are something Duffy does well and I enjoyed most of them. I expected this to be quite an adventurous tale set against a gritty historical backdrop. Weirdly, I ended up enjoying this book about as much as I expected, although for different reasons than anticipated. And Stella Duffy will break your heart.Ī quick disclaimer – I won an arc of this in a Goodreads giveaway, but that has no influence on my review and all opinions are my own! You will care terribly about the people in this book. And there's a little corner all to itself for Stella Duffy's books, many of which fit the bill.Īdded bonus points for being based on a real episode, 'London Lies Beneath' is another tour de force from an author with the most astonishing ability to write characters and believable dialogue for them. Josephine Bell's 'The Port of London Murders' Maureen Duffy's 'Londoners' Margery Allingham's 'The Tiger in the Smoke' Sara Water's 'The Night Watch' all have a place. Background, foreground, major player, less important subtext, all of them have my home town as a tangible element of their plot and colour. Inclusion on this shelf requires a specific qualification, namely that London itself should be a character.

There's a large, virtual shelf called 'London Novels'. And, of course, the beauty of virtual shelving is any book can, simultaneously, sit on any number of shelves. There's 'quite good mysteries set in all-female closed communities' 'lesbian coming-of-age novels' 'pretty awful novels that have a residual sentimental value'. On my bookshelves, amongst the traditionally-sorted-by-author rows, there have always been any number of 'virtual classifications, unknown to anyone but me.

London Lies Beneath by Stella Duffy