City of the mind

City of the mind : a novel / Penelope Lively.-- New York : HarperCollinsPublishers, c1991.
231 p. ; 22 cm.
1st U.S. ed. "First published in Great Britain in 1991 by André Deutsch Ltd."--T.p. verso.
ISBN: 9780060166663

1. Architects – Fiction. 2. London (England) – Fiction. 3. Psychological fiction.

823.914

Architect Matthew Hallard is distracted. He’s engaged in a large building project, but as he gazes about the site he sees not only the London of his own time in 1990, but buildings that take him back to the 1820s or to the Renaissance. As his mind wanders from his present cares: the break-up of his marriage, his eight-year-old daughter Jane, encounters with an unscrupulous developer, and the good-looking young woman he chanced to encounter in a sandwich shop, his story is interleaved with the stories of other Londoners from other times: an air-raid warden during the blitz, a Victorian natural scientist, Elizabethan explorer Martin Frobisher, and several unnamed children from the past.

Lively ponders the fragile bonds of human affection, estrangement, loss, hope and industry as it swirls through the city and through time. Ultimately it’s a reassuring meditation.