City of the Mind — Penelope Lively

A “well crafted . . . fascinating” story of a London architect's struggle for identity in love and career (Time Out).
 
This is the city in which everything is simultaneous. There is no yesterday, nor tomorrow, merely weather, and decay, and construction.
 
In London's changing heartland, architect Matthew Halland can't help but contemplate how the past and the present blend. It stirs memories of his boyhood, the early years with his daughter, and the failed marriage he has not yet put behind him. Here, too, is the London of prehistory, of Georgian elegance, of the Blitz. But at the same time, Matthew must keep focused on the constructing of a new future for London -- his latest project in Docklands -- and with it he begins to forge new beginnings of his own.
 
City of the Mind is the “lucid and complex, meditative and playful, concise and expansive” second novel from the Man Booker Prize�"winning author (The Washington Post Book World).