London,

Hiding in the East End

Fire bombs, terrorists, gangland vendettas and corrupt MPs. The world of Matthew d'Ancona's first novel is familiar from a hundred airport thrillers. What distinguishes it is the author's refined imagination, which he combines with a keen eye for the contemporary.

This is a portrait of London as it is right now, this morning, this very minute, in all its splendour, ugliness and variety.

The heroine, Mia Taylor, is a child of privilege. Born and raised in The Boltons, she belongs to one of those infuriatingly sophisticated families where everyone oozes charm, beauty and brains and the children swear in front of the parents.

Like her highflying brothers and sisters, Mia is poised for success. She works for a leading political consultancy while her boyfriend is a rising star in the Commons. Then disaster strikes. The family is wiped out by a terrorist bomb.

As the only survivor, Mia flees to the East End to mend her shattered spirit in a community untouched by her past. She takes a job managing an alternative therapy centre. Improbable as this sounds, her inner life is evoked with so much sympathy and skill that her search for redemption seems perfectly plausible.

She discovers that her family were not quite what they seemed. Her father kept a mistress for 30 years. Her adored brother was laundering money for dodgy East Enders. As she investigates the true cause of their deaths she becomes a target for further reprisals.

D'Ancona is no stranger to privilege himself - he is a fellow of All Souls and deputy editor of The Sunday Telegraph - but these advantages have opened rather than sealed up his eyes. His East End is instantly recognisable as a world where old and new exist in perpetual conflict. He describes the church at Spitalfields designed by Hawksmoor as "a beast he had chained to the earth of the immortal city and left behind him to growl and scrape its tethered claws against the ground long after he was gone". A few yards away in Brick Lane he sizes up a gang of Asian hoodlums.

Their leader, Aasim, stands out from the others. "He laid claim to his dominions by exempting himself from their ugliness. On another teenager, his pierced eyebrow and severe buzzcut would have looked ridiculous, but on Aasim they were badges of menace, clean and spare and perfectly judged."

D'Ancona's political antennae are particularly sensitive. In his hands, every conversation is a poker game, a tournament of feints, rallies, skirmishes and compromises where weaknesses are probed and false moves ruthlessly punished. His fascination with characters and his ability to breathe life into insignificant personalities causes the narrative to be too thickly layered in places.

Although this impedes the momentum of the story, it is the slenderest of complaints that a book is overpopulated with vivid characters. What is more, this impressive debut must have been written during spare evenings and weekends off. One wonders what he might be capable of if he turned to fiction full time.

A classic, probably.

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