Londoners

The best book about London in at least a decade

Londonist

This is a book to deepen your relationship with London and make you fall in — or out — of love with it all over again… I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed it.

Evening Standard

A rich and exuberant kaleidoscopic portrait of a great, messy, noisy, daunting, inspiring, maddening, enthralling, constantly shifting Rorschach test of a place… though countless excellent books have been written on the city, this is the one that best captures what it’s like to live in London right now, through the words of the people themselves — just as Studs Terkel did for Chicago in his oral histories years ago… Londoners is a master class in self-effacing journalism. In an age of celebrity interviewers and bombastic, self-loving television hosts, Taylor is the rare specimen who appears genuinely to believe that other people’s words are more interesting than his own.

Sarah Lyall, New York Times

Memorable, funny and occasionally melancholy… a rich, satisfying tapestry of metropolitan life

The Times

The book will be, in its own way, as useful to future generations as the diaries of Pepys or Boswell…Taylor’s superb book does full justice to London and its people, and should be enjoyed by everyone, whether they love the place or regret ever having set foot there.

Alexander Larman, The Observer

Abuzz with the life and spirit of the capital city right now… we salute this brilliant book

Dazed and Confused

An epic portrait in eighty voices that shows the city to be just as… well… Dickensian as it has ever been

The Guardian

[A] splendid oral history of the city… On occasions Londoners attains a level of eloquence as beautiful and blue as anything to be found in the works of Jean Rhys or Samuel Selvon… A remarkable volume.

Sukhdev Sandhu, The Guardian

Craig Taylor tunes in to the multi-tongued, self-justifying noise of the streets. And he leaves us with a substantial account, not just of our imaginary riverside capital, but, more vividly, of himself: as inquirer, investigator, part of a long and valuable lineage… Here is a monument pieced together from a mass of broken shards. A work made from work, from movement.

Iain Sinclair, The Observer

A reader does not have to be a Londoner to enjoy the book, but only someone who is fascinated by people… This book must be read from end to end, and I would bet that anyone who does that will, like me, wish it was longer. To those two famous masters of oral history, Studs Terkel and Ronald Blythe, we must now add the name of Craig Taylor.

Diana Athill, Literary Review