Longlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize 2016, formerly known as the Samuel Johnson Prize.

This is the new London: an immigrant city. Over one-third of Londoners were born abroad, with fifty percent arriving because the millennium. This has absolutely transformed the administrative centre, for better and for worse.

Ben Judah is an acclaimed international correspondent, but here he changes his reporter’s gaze on home, immersing himself in the hidden world of London’s immigrants to reveal the city in the eyes of its beggars, concerning this is London: Life and Death in the Globe City bankers, coppers, gangsters, carers and witch-doctors. From your backrooms of its mosques, Tube tunnels and nightclubs to the frontlines of its streets, Judah offers supped with oligarchs and spent evenings sleeping rough, worked on building sites and talked business with prostitutes; he’s heard stories of heartbreaking failing, but also witnessed extraordinary acts of compassion.

That is London explodes fossilized myths and offers a brand new, exciting portrait of what it’s like to live, work, fall in love, raise children, get old and die in London now. Simultaneously close and epic, this is a compulsive and deeply sympathetic book upon this dizzying world city in one of our brightest fresh writers.