Canadian journalist Craig Taylor uses the voices of Londoners – ‘Those Who Love it, Hate it, Live it, Left it and Long for it’ in the words of his subtitle – to produce a portrait of London in the 21st century. Taylor is an eavesdropper of genius, as shown in his One Million Tiny Plays about Britain and the sheer variety of stories, histories and viewpoints on display here makes a nonsense of the concept of the ‘ordinary’ Londoner. Sukhdev Sandhu wrote in the Guardian ‘[This is] a remarkable volume, from the heaving, contradictory energy of its countless funny, terrifying, epic stories – crackheads looking for a lost swan in Baker Street, an Iranian homosexual shivering in Calais as he waits for a lorry to take him to his promised land, a Wiccan priestess tipping the remains of her spells over Waterloo Bridge. All this diversity serves to confirm the truth of what one of Taylor's interviewees tells him in a Cricklewood pub: “The only thing I know is that a real Londoner, a real one, would never, ever, ever eat at one of those bloody Angus bloody Steak Houses in the West End.”’

Granta | Paperback 448 pp. |ISBN: 9781847083296