A Darker Circle, her penultimate 2016 novel and one of my favorites, was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and dealt with teenage twins in post-World War Two England who are sent to a tuberculosis hospital, their release, and their lifelong bond: it's deeply affecting and memorable.

Though the cynical might say that this ‘welcome’ has primarily happened when it suited us to do so for reasons of our own economic prosperity, rather than as a movement driven by compassion. In fact the genesis of the novel, Grant says, dates back to 1992, when, as a journalist, she attended the burial of an unknown woman drowned in the Thames. It is too difficult to hold so many characters in the mind all at once, so each time a character re-appears, he or she has to be re-learned.

With her characters she explores important themes like: community; isolation; loneliness; individuality; privacy in a social media era etc. A Stranger City is a sinuous tale centring on a documentary about the recovery of a female body from The Thames, identity still unknown six months later.

For me, the London thing has been done to death (and I live in London), Ali Smith, Jonathan Coe and others have written novels about Britain and Brexit and I just got bored with A Stranger City. But anyhow don't be fooled, deportations are decreasing in the UK, and I've actually been shocked to see the high number of Romanians being deported.

And many of us still struggle to understand how what seemed so obviously to lack credibility – the sunlit uplands, the fictional windfalls, the have your cakery and eat it tooery – got believed. The interconnectivity of each perspective makes for a sinuous and fluid tale, reminiscent of the river around which the city revolves. A Stranger City is centred on the imagined enclave of Wall Park, below the North Circular, though readers familiar with Bowes Park, Myddleton Road and the New River will recognise the neighbourhood. It’s a panoramic, sometimes discursive account of contemporary London – a city of strangers – and while the shadow of Brexit and its accompanying pervasive anxiety – the city becoming stranger – hangs over the story, it manages to use the B word only once. The usual political grievances prejudices and opinions are aired continually but the descriptive prose is a plus.