London

Bleak, bleak, bleak. Anita Brookner’s new novel, Stran- gers, is unlikely to inspire resolutions to self-improvement or even cathartic tears. But its main character, a retired bank manager called Paul Sturgis, is a brilliant and affecting creation by a writer whose empathy runs deep, and whose pitch is perfect. Sturgis, 72 years old, is in good health and financially well off. His trouble — and it is deep — is of another kind. He lives in a well-kept but dark and depressing flat in London. He has no children — only a distant female relative who lives on the other side of town and for whom he has no particular

Iain Sinclair is as dark as London scribes come. Engaged in a lifelong literary project, he records his own psychic and physical travels around the city, identifying what he calls ‘disappear- ances’ — people, buildings, spaces that no longer exist, but that haunt the present. While Peter Ackroyd is in thrall to London, revelling in its labyrinthine past and bounding enthusiastically over its landscape, Sinclair instead seems tortured by the place, lost in an infinity of connections and coincidences, and made paranoid by the ghosts that he unearths. Nowhere, it seems, is this paranoia more intense than in Hackney, his home borough for the last 40 years. This book is