Patrick Radden Keefe on London's dark descent

And it's a cliche to say the city is really a character.

People say that about cities in books all the time.

But for London, in the story you're telling, London is the setting, but there's also a real question about London's character.

Can you talk a bit about the forces at work in the London of the sort of 2000s, 2010s,

Yeah, I mean, you know, it's funny.

I think of this book as very much a book about reinvention.

So adolescence is a time of reinvention.

We all kind of reinvent ourselves.

Zach took the idea of reinvention to an extreme in the sense that he invented a whole new alter ego.

I go into the kind of personal histories of Zach and Verinder and Akbar, and you see these interesting stories of reinvention and their backstories with their parents and grandparents.

But it's also a story about London reinventing itself.

It's about this city that started as one thing and became another.

And I have a sort of a personal insight into this because I lived in London in 2000, 2001.

Just after I got out of college, I went to grad school there.

I lived on the South Bank.

I lived near Tower Bridge.

And I've watched the city change over the last quarter of a century.

And I go back practically every year.

I've got dear friends there.

London transformed, and I think the transformation started at an earlier era.

Really, it started in the 1980s, where for centuries, London had been a manufacturing town.

It was a city where things were built.

You had these big factories that lined the Thames, and they kind of built smoke into the air.

It was also a shipping city.

It was one of the most important ports in the world in history because of the British Empire.