RESULTS

An unreliable narrator, exiled on the coast, looks back on a book he may never have written. On a walk down the A13 from Aldgate Pump to Southend he acquires a package left by a missing woman - a package of stories that anticipate his quest.

Once an Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty. Now, the Olympics, a final attempt to clamp down on a renegade spirit, seeks to complete the process: erasure disguised as 'progress'. In this 'documentary fiction', Sinclair meets a cast of the dispossessed, including writers, photographers, bomb-makers and market traders. Legends of tunnels, Hollow Earth theories and the notorious Mole Man are unearthed. He uncovers traces of those who passed through Hackney: Lenin and Stalin, novelists Joseph Conrad and Samuel Richardson, film-makers Orson Welles and Jean-Luc Godard, Tony Blair beginning his political career, even a Baader-Meinhof urban guerrilla on the run. And he tells his own story: of 40 years in one house in Hackney, of marriage, children, strange encounters, deaths.

Walking the streets of London, Iain Sinclair traces nine routes across the territory of the capital. Connecting people and places, redrawing boundaries both ancient and modern, reading obscure signs and finding hidden patterns, Sinclair creates a fluid snapshot of the city. In this volume he give us a provocative, enlightening and disturbing picture of modern urban life. And in the process he reveals the dark underbelly of a London many of us did not know existed.

This novel combines a spiritual inquest into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the Victorian imagination with the story of a posse of seedy book dealers, hot on the trail of obscure rarities of that period.

London is a city of disappearances and fallible memories. Alongside the contemporary city, of noise and celebrity, is that other city: of the dead, the unvoiced, the erased. Here there are fabulous identities which, freed from their mundane reality, survive as eternal fictions, and urban myths with more blood and vigour than the contemporary cartoons of manufactured notoriety. Iain Sinclair has long been fascinated by interzones, cracks, crannies, 'lost' biographies and myths of place. In London: City of Disappearances, he turns away from official versions and approved histories, and, with the help of Tibor Fischer, Rachel Lichtenstein, Nicholas Royle, Sarah Wise and others, brings to light the fugitive scraps, ragpicker's bundles, faded newspaper cuttings and patterns in the dust.