A rainy Camden night, December 1996. 20-year-old Eily and 40-year-old Stephen retrace the course of their two-year love affair in search of what's gone wrong. Is it Stephen's reconnection with his long-lost teenage daughter, Grace? Or that he's a well-known actor while Eily's still at drama school? Maybe the autobiographical film he's just made has brought his old demons back to the surface? Or perhaps Eily's youth has led her into a mistake she doesn't know how to fix?
While it’s probably not essential to have read the older novel in order to understand this new one, it frankly would be foolish not to read everything that McBride has written ... The quicksilver slickness that characterizes McBride’s best prose is disrupted by the novel’s continuous time jumps, but The City still conclusively demonstrates why she is one of the most thrilling contemporary English-language writers ... By the stratospheric standards of her prior novels, however, The City does stumble in a few ways that feel entangled with the author’s recent foray into film.
Overwrought but arresting, the drama relies upon the immediacy of Ms. McBride’s prose, in which fractious, vibratory sentences communicate the shorthand of Eily’s agitated thoughts ... You submit to the soap opera of the story for the sensitivity of the style, which, like an emotional seismograph, registers every nuance of fondness and fear.
McBride is at her most virtuosic in this novel when excavating forbidden emotional depths too dark to be confronted outside the pages of fiction. With its vividly realised characters, lurid plot and lyrically compacted prose, The City Changes Its Face is a typical McBride work. Praise doesn’t come much higher.
