This is one of those mega books, 800+ pages, that took me a bit to get through. The novel contains many interesting episodes from 54 B.C. to the 20th century, but when you tackle 2,000 years in one volume, character development is going to suffer. In spite of the many fascinating London insights in this book, for a true sense of multifaceted personality of this city, I might recommend Peter Ackroyd’s London: The Biography , which at 801 pages is only slightly shorter than London:The Novel. But if you're a quicker reader than I am, you could read both in half the time it took me to read one!