Mother London is well written and it has some fine scenes and three in­ter­est­ing characters. I wanted to like it but it never engaged me because the story goes nowhere. I rarely abandon books, but I gave up on this two-thirds of the way through.

Mother London follows three out­pa­tients from a mental hospital, between 1940 and the 1980s: Josef Kiss, a larger-than-life performer, David Mummery, a writer, and Mary Gasalee, a housewife who spends fifteen years in a coma, after the Blitz. All three seem to be psy­chi­cal­ly sensitive to the thoughts of others. The narrative hop­scotch­es back and forth across the decades London itself is the fourth character, lovingly described in many guises.