London's overthrow

Londons Overthrow is a potent polemic describing the capital in a time of austerity at the beginning of the twenty-first century.

Award-winning author and essayist China Miville cuts through the hyperbole of our politicians to present a view from ordinary London of the inequality, oppression and indignity and the hidden, subversive sentiment pervading throughout our streets.

China Miville does more than reveal the skull beneath the Londons scabby, piebald skin; he offers effervescent nourishment for the downpressed souls that stalk the streets of his divided city.

Anybody who wants to know what has happened here in the ground zero of a failed neoliberal experiment must start with his unsettling panorama.

Paul Gilroy Miville gives us a vision of a pre-apocalyptic London, where the chasm between rich and poor has reached catastrophic levels and anger is the only reasonable response.

Hari Kunzru