Waterloo-City, City-Waterloo — Leanne Shapton

Leanne Shapton, author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris and Swimming Studies, creates an authorly and artistic response to travel, work and being a passenger - part of a series of twelve books tied to the twelve lines of the London Underground, as Tfl celebrates 150 years of the Tube with Penguin

'Leanne Shapton has updated the stream of consciousness method of Virginia Woolf in Mrs Dalloway to give us the appearance and thoughts of different passengers - about work, sex, family, what they are reading ... Thus you eavesdrop on a hubbub: all that mental life going on secretly all the time'
Evening Standard

'Authors include the masterly John Lanchester, the children of Kids Company, comic John O'Farrell and social geographer Danny Dorling. Ranging from the polemical to the fantastical, the personal to the societal, they offer something for every taste. All experience the city as a cultural phenomenon and notice its nature and its people. Read individually they're delightful small reads, pulled together they offer a particular portrait of a global city' Evening Standard

'Exquisitely diverse' The Times

'Eclectic and broad-minded ... beautifully designed' Tom Cox, Observer

'A fascinating collection with a wide range of styles and themes. The design qualities are excellent, as you might expect from Penguin with a consistent look and feel while allowing distinctive covers for each book. This is a very pleasing set of books' A Common Reader blog

'The contrasts and transitions between books are as stirring as the books themselves ... A multidimensional literary jigsaw' Londonist

'A series of short, sharp, city-based vignettes - some personal, some political and some pictorial ... each inimitable author finds that our city is complicated but ultimately connected, full of wit, and just the right amount of grit' Fabric Magazine

'A collection of beautiful books' Grazia

Leanne Shapton is an artist, illustrator, and writer who was born in Toronto and lives in New York. She is the author of Important Artifacts and Personal Property from the Collection of Lenore Doolan and Harold Morris, Including Books, Street Fashion, and Jewelry. Her latest book, Swimming Studies, is published July 2012.