Going East

by Matthew d'Ancona

Book Overview

Going East] does for contemporary London what The Bonfire of the Vanities did for 1980s New York. Once you start reading, you are unlikely to stop. Once you finish, it makes you think about the world... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0385510497
• ISBN13: 9780385510493
• Release Date: July 2004
• Publisher: Nan A. Talese
• Length: 370 Pages
• Weight: 1.54 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.2" x 6.6" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

"Treachery had held her hand, and told her fresh lies"

As well as being a magnet for different cultures for hundreds of years, the East End has a reputation for being the face of traditional London. Asian families have replaced the white laborers and taxi drivers, the traditional old working class of East End. Wholesale shops now line deserted streets and the artless middle classes have followed, looking for loft space and bohemian scenery. A new tribe has staked its claim on East End. Today, new developments in Docklands and regeneration projects in surrounding areas are attracting an interesting range of people - from City professionals and financiers to artists and designers - and there is a stimulating and lively multicultural community centering on Brick Lane, Spitalfields, Petticoat Lane and the Columbia Road Flower Market. But there also remains a kind of sinister charm, a mythological history, and a rugged dynamism to this part of London. This area of transience and change is the setting for Matthew d'Ancona's novel, Going East, which has a strange and exciting mixture of mystery and suspense. Going East centers on the young, upwardly mobile Mia Taylor. Mia's family has been incredibly successful ? they're beautiful, loving, well respected, close-knit, and very rich. The Taylors have something called the ?golden thread? ? a glittering fiber that encircles them, binding them together. They are celebrating Mia's brother's thirtieth with a picnic in the park. Papa Taylor is a hard-working self-made man and Mama Taylor is the doting, but firm matriarch who has chosen a life of family rather than an ambassadorship with the Foreign Office. Tragedy strikes however, when the entire family, except for Mia, is killed in a bomb blast in her brother's apartment. A rebel faction of the IRA initially takes the blame, saying that the death of the Taylors was an unfortunate mistake and that they were actually targeting the apartment next door. As the story evolves, Mia realizes that there has been a terrible cover-up, and she is forced to expunge a dark secret at the center of her family involving political corruption and Islamic militancy. In order to escape her demons, the grief ?stricken Mia gives up the high life of London's affluent Kensington - with the "skiing and skunk set of Fulham Road, the boys in their cricket jumpers, drinking Japanese beer and dreaming of Porsches full of blondes" - moving instead to London's East End where she grieves, works as a deputy manager at Echinacea, a grubby, new age community centre, and lives off her trust fund. She meets a variety of different people who changer her life in different ways, including Rob, a grubby East End rocker, Ringo an Indian who owns the local record store, and an alcoholic, but surprisingly well-educated transient, Tommy Bonkers whom she tries to help. Going East is indeed literary. D'Ancona writes with a competent ease, and the outcome is at once a hybrid of high art and pop fiction. It's part political thriller, part romance,