Mother London

Mother London is a novel by Michael Moorcock. Published in 1988, it was shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize. Although the city of London itself is perhaps the central character, it follows three outpatients from a mental hospital—a music hall artist, a reclusive writer and a woman just awoken from a long coma —who experience the history of the city from the Blitz to the late eighties through chaotic experience and sensory delusions. The novel is a non-chronological compilation of episodes, snippets and sidelines, rather than a single cohesive narrative. A piece in The Guardian called it 'a great, humane document'.