In Paradise City, British novelist Elizabeth Day (Home Fires) traces the unexpected ways four characters' lives intersect in the bustle of contemporary London.
Beatrice Kizza is a refugee from Uganda, where homosexuality is illegal, haunted by her rape and the threat of jail when she was discovered with her lover by a family friend. Now a chambermaid in a high-end London hotel, she grieves for the lover she left behind. Self-made millionaire Howard Pink, whose teenage daughter disappeared 15 years earlier, tries to escape the pain of loss in the benign anonymity of his solitary hotel stays. Esme Reade, a young reporter at a London tabloid, angles for a career-making interview with Pink. Carol Hetherington, elderly and recently widowed, lives next door to a man who keeps devastating secrets. London is more than the backdrop to these four individuals' lives. This crowded and teeming city holds vastly different characters and is the beacon for their hopes and dreams.
Day is both sensitive and cuttingly astute in her depiction of her characters' struggles. The four are believable and vividly limned, Beatrice most of all. She may be on the margins of society, but she is consistently surprising in her reactions and observations. Paradise City is beautifully written and closely observed, but its strength lies in Day's compassion for her characters and her understanding that, beneath the surface, the strivers and the invisible, the glittering and the lonely, are people united by the universal need for acceptance and love. --Jeanette Zwart, freelance writer and reviewer