Book review: Hearts and Minds

Hearts and Minds By Amanda Craig. Photo / Supplied

A vivid portrait of a time and a place, I can see exactly why UK author Amanda Craig's sixth novel was longlisted for the 2010 Orange Prize (sadly it didn't make the cut to the shortlist).

The story is set in pre-credit crunch London and opens with the body of a young woman being dumped in the Hampstead Heath Ponds. Although not strictly fitting into the crime genre, the girl's identity, why she died and the lives of those she knew form the backbone of the novel.

What Craig pulls off is clever and risky. She moves from one apparently disparate character to another, chronicling their hopes, tragedies and frustrations and slowly revealing their connections until finally showing the skein that holds them all together.

Polly is a human rights lawyer and single mum, struggling to balance kids with work and wondering why her au pair has suddenly disappeared.
Ian is a young teacher, a South African expat, dispirited by his job in a low decile school, wary of being trapped into marriage by his girlfriend and in London to make an important connection. Job is a Zimbabwean refugee who worries about his family's safety and works every hour he can to send money home to them.

Anna is young, pretty and from the Ukraine, but the promise of a new life in London turns out to be a lie and she is forced into prostitution. Katie is an American suffering from a broken heart and working on an eccentric and arty political magazine.

Craig layers on the details of these characters' lives, using them to hammer home what she has to say about a variety of social issues while somehow managing not to drag down the pace of the narrative. Her writing is witty when it could easily be didactic, satirical rather than spiteful.

I've read several other novels based on the stories of London's unwanted - and yet much needed - sub-class of migrants, but this one holds its own. The fact Craig suffered a life-threatening illness and multiple surgeries during the writing of it makes the achievement all the more remarkable.

Although Hearts And Minds links with two of her previous novels, its not a sequel and can be read independently. I'd recommend it because it's one of those rare novels with scope and intelligence that keeps you turning the pages as avidly as if it were a more conventional crime novel.

Hearts and Minds By Amanda Craig, Little Brown, $27.99