White City : ‘The best crime novel I’ve read this year’ THE TIMES

Published 03/07/2025 | Paperback / softback,
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THE BEST CRIME NOVEL OF 2024 – THE TIMES BEST CRIME BOOKS OF 2024 – SUNDAY TIMES BOOKS OF THE MONTH – THE GUARDIAN ‘I very much doubt I’ll read a better crime novel this year’ IAN RANKIN’The best crime novel I’ve read this year’ THE TIMES’Quite breathtaking’ DAILY MAIL’Superb’ THE GUARDIAN’Dominic Nolan is a wonderful writer’ CHRIS WHITAKER’A truly excellent crime novel’ MAIL ON SUNDAYIt’s 1952, and London is victorious but broken, a city of war ruins and rationing, run by gangsters and black-market spivs.

An elaborate midnight heist, the biggest robbery in British history, sends newspapers into a frenzy. Politicians are furious, the police red-faced. They have suspicions but no leads. Hunches but no proof.

For two families, it is more than just a sensational headline, as their fathers fail to return home on the day of the robbery.

Young Addie Rowe, daughter of a missing Jamaican postman and drunk ex-club hostess mother, struggles to care for her little sister in a dilapidated Brixton rooming house.

Claire Martin, increasingly resentful of roads not taken, strives to make the rent and keep her teenage son Ray from falling under unsavoury influences in Notting Dale.

She finds herself caught between the interests of dangerous men who may know the truth behind her husband’s disappearance: Dave Lander, whose reserved nature she finds difficult to reconcile with his reputation as a violent gang enforcer, and Teddy ‘Mother’ Nunn, a sociopathic, evangelising outlaw and top lieutenant in Billy Hill’s underworld.

Drawn together through the years in the city’s invisible web of crime and poverty, the fates of the broken families and violent men collide in 1958, as the West Indian community of Notting Hill’s slums come under attack from thugs and Teddy Boys. For Addie, Claire, Dave and Mother, old scores will be settled and new dreams chased in the crucible of London’s violent summer.

‘Dominic Nolan is one hell of a writer’ MARK BILLINGHAM’Incredibly good… one of the most interesting, brilliant crime writers around’ JANE CASEY’What a triumph. What an absolutely magnificent achievement’ A.J. FINN’Mind-blowing…so much more than a crime novel. An amazing piece of work’ SARAH PINBOROUGH’An extraordinary piece of work’ HARRIET TYCE’This is one of the richest, most absorbing novels I’ve read all year’ TOM BENN