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Summary
Summary
Beatrice Kizza , a woman in flight from a homeland that condemned her for daring to love, flees to London. There, she shields her sorrow from the indifference of her adopted city, and navigates a night-time world of shift-work and bedsits. Howard Pink is a self-made millionaire who has risen from Petticoat Lane to the mansions of Kensington on a tide of determination and bluster. Yet self-doubt still snaps at his heels and his life is shadowed by the terrible loss that has shaken him to his foundations. Carol Hetherington , recently widowed, is living the quiet life in Wandsworth with her cat and The Jeremy Kyle Show for company. As she tries to come to terms with the absence her husband has left on the other side of the bed, she frets over her daughter's prospects and wonders if she'll ever be happy again. Esme Reade is a young journalist learning to muck-rake and doorstep in pursuit of the elusive scoop, even as she longs to find some greater meaning and leave her imprint on the world.Four strangers, each inhabitants of the same city, where the gulf between those who have too much and those who will never have enough is impossibly vast. But when the glass that separates Howard's and Beatrice's worlds is shattered by an inexcusable act, they discover that the capital has connected them in ways they could never have imagined.
Author Notes
Elizabeth Day is the author of Scissors, Paper, Stone , which won a Betty Trask Award, and Home Fires . She is an award-winning journalist who has worked for the Evening Standard , the Sunday Telegraph and the Mail on Sunday , and is now a feature writer for the Observer . She grew up in Northern Ireland, and currently lives in London.@elizabdaywww.elizabethdayonline.co.uk
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Journalist and author Day (Home Fires) connects the lives of four Londoners in this tale of grief, hardship, and hope. Sir Howard Pink is a multimillionaire who rose from humble origins but has since lost his way after the disappearance of his 19-year-old daughter, Ada. Beatrice Kizza is one of his maids, a refugee from Uganda. Esme Reade is a young reporter at a weekly paper who has not yet lost her empathy for her subjects and is assigned to interview Howard. And Carol Hetherington is a widow, slowly learning to live her life without her husband Derek, who makes a discovery that inextricably binds her to Howard. The ways in which Day brings this ensemble together is both surprising and rewarding. Through standout prose, including some brilliant imagery, she uses her characters and situations to describe a London that reveals "all its grubby glamor, all its twisted secrets and oozing promise of possibility." (Dec.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
As so many novels do these days, this one follows several characters whose stories converge over the course of the book. Howard Pink is a flamboyant businessman whose wealth has garnered him a trophy wife and entrée into London's high society. But money hasn't bought him personal respect, nor has it dampened the pain of his only daughter's disappearance years earlier. Esme, a young reporter, struggles with her own loss and sublimated desire for a father figure. Constantly pushed to exploit the misfortune of others, she finds unexpected comradeship when she's granted a rare interview with Pink. Beatrice, who works as a maid in an upscale hotel that Pink frequents, is looking for a way to improve her circumstances and leave behind the memories of her persecution as a gay woman in Uganda. Finally, Carol is a lonely widow with an odd neighbor whose intense stares and off manner make her uncomfortable. In each case, an unforeseen encounter unleashes tightly reined-in emotions and offers the characters new opportunities for connection and growth. Their journeys make for a highly readable and humane novel.--Weber, Lynn Copyright 2015 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
NOVELS IN WHICH separate story lines collide often give the impression that even the most disparate people are somehow connected. And when that collision occurs through an act of violence, it's sometimes assumed that other differences can be ignored - because, after all, what life has been lived without some pain and suffering? At best, such stories come across as saccharine odes to our shared humanity. But in a novel like Elizabeth Day's tale of contemporary London, "Paradise City," they can seem to exploit the circumstances of the less fortunate and the marginalized. A feature writer for The Observer, Day opens her third novel with a brief scene inspired by the scandal involving Dominique Strauss-Kahn and Nafissatou Diallo, the maid who accused him of sexually assaulting her in a New York hotel. Sir Howard Pink, a self-made millionaire in his 60s with a fashion empire and an "ever so slightly more corpulent form," checks into a London hotel, where he forces himself upon a maid. Despite what he assumes, his victim, Beatrice Kizza, would never have consented to his advances, and even the government knows it - she has been granted refugee status as a lesbian after fleeing her native Uganda, where homosexuality remains a crime. To her credit, Day doesn't depict Howard as a one-dimensional lecher. Yet the gloomy reasoning she gives for his actions won't suffice: 11 years earlier, his teenage daughter, Ada, went missing and has never been found. Tormented by this unresolved trauma, he sequesters himself in a hotel once a month for solitary grieving and introspection - and, it appears, whatever else might result. Ada also links Howard to the novel's two other major characters. Esme Reade, an ambitious but disillusioned reporter for a weekend tabloid, forms an unexpected bond with Howard when he learns that her father died in a drunken-driving accident when she was 8; she later secures the first interview he has given since his daughter's disappearance. Carol Hetherington, newly widowed, lives an unassuming life in a quiet neighborhood - until she makes a macabre discovery in her neighbor's garden. The plot's uniting of this foursome around the fate of a white teenager from a wealthy family reflects a larger problem in British society, where an ever growing number of immigrants, particularly from Africa, the Indian subcontinent and Asia, feel that their concerns are being ignored by both the government and their neighbors. Beatrice suffers the same fate at Day's hands. The horrors of her life, including an even more violent sexual attack that took place back in Uganda and her constant fear that her partner will never join her in England, are carefully detailed, but they're eclipsed by the novel's fixation with Ada and with Ada's father's tortured soul. While Beatrice is determined "to stop being a faceless person among the masses of other faceless people afraid to make a noise, fearful of disrupting the precarious equilibrium of their existence," can she possibly be anything but "a nobody" here? Considering how Ada's ghost haunts most of the chapters dedicated to Beatrice's perspective, the game feels rigged against her. Day's physical descriptions of London - from its "grimy rib cage" that "seems to lift and expand" on rare sunny mornings to its inhabitants who "tsk-tsk at tourists taking too long to understand the tube map" - reveal her sensitivity to nuanced detail. But the way the priorities of "Paradise City" so accurately represent the troubling state of today's Britain is an unlikely, and far from ideal, testament to her skill as a writer. CHARLES SHAFAIEH contributes to The Times Literary Supplement, The New Yorker and other publications.
Kirkus Review
A handful of strangers in London find themselves connected, and changed, by dark eventssudden death, sexual assaultand the humbling of a self-made man. Four characters narrate the new novel from British journalist-turned-author Day (Home Fires, 2013): rag-trade tycoon Sir Howard Pink; ambitious journalist Esme Reade; haunted Ugandan immigrant Beatrice Kizza; and a widow, Carol Hetherington, whose role in the story moves from peripheral to central. Pink (originally named Fink, the son of Jewish immigrants), with his passing resemblance to a real-life British businessman, starts the ball rolling via an action that brings to mind another figure from news headlines when he forces himself sexually on a black chambermaid in an upscale English hotel. The chambermaid is Beatrice, and there will be repercussions. Pink is no stranger to the media. His rags-to-riches background and high-profile, luxurious lifestyle make good copy. But he's also known for the family tragedy that befell him 11 years earlier: the disappearance of his lovely but troubled 19-year-old daughter, Ada. Day's journalistic experience clearly infuses her novel, not just in her borrowing of front-page events and characters or in the plausible background to Esme's work environment, but also in the briskly efficient narration. Her characters have fully documented psychologies, rounded out with precise detail, and her plot, although it invokes big issuesrace, class, sexismdelivers shrewd, well-paced storytelling. Most memorable is the trajectory of Sir Howard, the bullying outsider whose descent into self-disgust and the abject depths of sorrow is achieved with surprising impact. In his orbit, Esme's career blossoms and Beatrice's life swerves away from isolation and nightmare, while the once-fearless entrepreneur himself emerges from suffering and self-scrutiny a better man. Despite a sugary, overly tidy ending, this is unusual, well-crafted storytelling enhanced by some telling emotional notes. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
In her third novel (after the Betty Trask Award-winning Scissors Paper Stone and Home Fires), British journalist Day pulls together skillfully the lives of four unrelated characters in contemporary London. Sir Howard Pink is a wealthy, self-made businessman who appears to be initially entirely obnoxious; we meet him as he is forcing his attentions on a maid in an upscale hotel. The maid, Beatrice, is a refugee from Uganda, and she is barely scraping by in this expensive city. The other main characters are Carol, a lonely older widow in the suburbs, and Esme, a young and frazzled reporter. As a journalist herself, Day is especially sardonic about the cutthroat world of the British tabloids. The fast-paced plot hooks the reader once Carol finds something disturbing in a neighbor's garden. VERDICT This well-crafted, imaginative story of contemporary London life will appeal to readers who loved John Lanchester's Capital and Penelope Lively's How It All Began. It blends witty comedy, touching poignancy, and a believable cast of characters in a novel that's hard to put down.-Leslie Patterson, Rehoboth, MA © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
