Everything you need to understand or teach City of the Mind by Penelope Lively.
A major focus of this novel is London itself. Lively foregrounds and personifies the city, describing it as "throb[bing]" and "pulsing" and portraying it as being fueled by the energies of the myriad individuals who inhabit it. This impression of the city's richness and texturedness is in part effected by the frequent cataloguing of the sights, sounds, and smells that bombard Matthew on his daily traversings of the city: the various ethnic...