Book description
Under his railway arch in Loughborough Junction, South London, Robert
Sutton is taking leave of a lifetime of hard work. His dry-cleaning shop
lies at the heart of a lively community, a fixed point in a changing
world. And, as he explains to his successor, young East Londoner Akeel,
it is also the resting place for the contents of his customers' pockets
- and for their secrets and lies. As he helps Akeel to make a new life
out of his old one, Robert also hands on all he knows of his world: the
dirty dip of the Thames; the parks, rare green oases in a desert of
high-rises and decaying mansion blocks; and the varied lives that
converge at the junction. Humming with life, packed tight with detail,
The Room of Lost Things is a hymn of love to a great and overflowing
city, and a profoundly human story that holds us in its grip from the
first sentence until the last.
