Rating: 
Summary: Great factual account done in a novel form
Review: I'm your basic non-fiction reader and love history books. However, when I got a hold of this novel about London, I decided to give it a try. As an American living in London and a history buff, this Novel is 100% fantastic. In fact, I gave it as a gift to friends of mine.The story is fairly interesting in its own right and compelling enough to capture me although I prefer non-fiction. The history tidbits hold my attention. There are places I recognize throughout the book that I have only seen in their present-day manifestation. Rutherfurd does a great job of letting me imagine how these places looked hundreds of years ago, what their historical significance is and how they became named as they did. All of this woven into a story of fiction is pretty complicated. You have to appreciate how difficult it must have been to pull this off. In my opinion, Rutherford does a marvelous job! A must read for anyone visiting or living in London.
Rating: 
Summary: Many books within a book
Review: I realized how truly long London was when I came upon the advertisement at the end of the book. Sitting two pages after the end it offered this book on tape and the abridged version clocked in at six hours! Now long is a relative word - to me a John Jakes or Herman Wouk book is a blink, an Ernest Hemingway or Gore Vidal novel a lifetime. I'd measure London as a decade. In what I consider good historical fiction, one that follows a family or group of people through a given period of time, you make a connection with the participants in the book. I consider books like North and South, Winds of War, Texas and the Immigrant series to set the standard. In these books you get a feel for the period and, most importantly, the people. You develop, in a small but definite way, a relationship and care what happens to them. In reading London I was in a fog by the eighteenth century. I didn't feel one way or the other about any of the characters and their families. Did they live happily ever after, go bankrupt, get kidnapped, die an untimely death? Who cared? Referals to the geneology chart didn't help much as the main characters changed their names, crossed family lines and skipped generations. While London is published as one book I found myself reading a number of books, each one the length of a chapter. Because of the time span of the novel, over 2000 years, there were lapses of hundreds of years between some chapters. When you finished one chapter and began the next you were really setting out on a new book - different people in a different time period with, other than their webbed feet and thatch of white hair, often little in common. I will give Mr. Rutherford his due however; the most interesting chapters were those that had all the elements of an outstanding book: good opening, character development, interesting plot and some amazing endings. When I took the 'new chapter, new approach' towards London I found the reading a lot easier. I really gave up on trying to tie the families and generations together; it really proved fruitless and didn't matter anyway. While I retained a general notion of who begat whom, as a rule, I just read each chapter as a singular event. Some of the chapters I found fascinating. The medieval, Tudor and Puritan periods were good stories in themselves, the late 19th and 20th century read like filler to get to the conclusion and from 1900 to the present was barely addressed. I would recommend London to someone who was looking, as I was, to learn about the history of this interesting city. After reading it I am a lot more knowledgable about London and that is something you always hope to take from a book. As an interesting historical novel, the kind that gets you involved, makes you care and leaves you wanting more, the book, like a archer's weak arrow, falls well short of the target.
Rating: 
Summary: Absolutely fascinating!
Review: A wise sage once said that history isn't about a bunch of boring facts and dates - it's a good story. London is certainly that and more. The only thing I would like to see is a companion volume with pictures of the buildings throughout the ages.
Rating:
Summary: Okay but unbalanced
Review: The appeal of this book is a general history lesson of London and England. You can learn how names like Auldwych and SoHo came about.
Then you have to deal with the fiction - contrived and not very introspective. The characters are not profound and most are predictable. The author didn't spend much effort on character development but then again, if he did, the book would be bigger.
And it seems like the author realized how long his book was when it came near completion and started chopping away. There's many pages about the story of the Celtic people who first lived around London but when you come to the 1900s or the 1940s, only one short chapter is allotted for that time period's story.
Not very insightful - a book to read for amusement or boredom. It does make you want to visit London though.
Rating: 
Summary: London- the punishment
Review: The author decided to carry on a noble task: telling the story of the city of London. This was the main reason I bought the book. I wanted to learn more about the city in which I had been living for 6 years. The begining was quite promising: Julius Caesar, battles and some very well described characters. The first two chapters were really interesting and one can share the emotions and feelings of Segovax, Julius and so on. Unfortunately, the rest of the chapters are often too short and dull. The reader don't have much time to become acquainted with the characters and he must cope with new ones once the chapter is over. While reading this novel, I found myself checking previous chapters over and over again in order to recognise long forgotten characters, suddendly deciding to reappear. It was all very confusing and annoying. Moreover, the writer took the decision to describe some of the families such as we hate them all along the book. Strangely enough, the members of these families react quite the same generation after generation: the "good ones" and "the bad ones". Of course, the only positive aspect of this book was London's history. All the chapters begin with an historical background that I enjoyed very much. However, such historical background can be found in any teaching book. Therefore, my conclusion is: avoid this book at any price, LONDON- THE NOVEL is too long, boring and painful. If you really wish to learn about England's capital, read an encyclopaedia, it is much more interesting than this novel.
Rating:
Summary: Worth the Effort
Review: I read Sarum and Russka years ago and remember them fondly. London follows the same course. Many of the stories were too short, making it difficult to identify with the characters. But several characters will be hard to forget, particularly the women: Susan Meredith, Sister Mable, Lucy Dogget and Jane Flemming. Perhaps certain episodes should have been edited out entirely, but over-all this long read was worth the commitment.
Rating:
Summary: A great book, despite the 1000+ pages
Review: London is really a very interesting book, it gives you a great picture of London through the years. If you see this book in a bookstore you'll think:"Oh my God, what a bulk!", but as soon as you start reading you'll find that you forget its size. The 1305 pages in the paperback are all filled with entertaining stories about life in London, and you'll read through them as easily as you'd read through the latest Crichton. Pity though that the author is very much interested in the Stuart-age, and it seems he thought when he reached the last hundred pages :"Oh, well, it's just the twentieth century, we all know that! I won't give it too much attention." The Victorian era is also given too little attention. But despite these things, it is a wonderful picture of life in London through the ages. This book is one of the rare books where it is thrilling to read about a man who's almost bitten by a flea. It's a great read for everyone who loves England and its capital.
Rating:
Summary: Stimulating, brought new vigour to an old subject
Review: I have read all of the authors books and had eagerly awaited the arival of London. I found the book re opened my eyes to the history of London but did not feel I was deliberately being educated in the process. This book would provide a delightful prequel to a visit to London to track down the sites mentioned in the book, a kind of historic travellogue. The characters are well drawn and you care what happens to them. My only real down side was as the book starts to approach the present day it is as if the author slightly looses interest and rushes to finish the story. Other wise well worth the effort of reading such a weighty tome.
Rating:
Summary: Once upon a time, there was a tribe, town, city of London
Review: The author does an admirable job explaining the intricacies of London history. However, each chapter could be expanded into a book in its own right and I found myself yearning for more information on the lives of the characters and less information on the economy and politics of London and surrounding areas.
Rating:
Summary: Great book, makes me want to read Sarum again!
Review: Loved the travel back in time this book brought me. Really made history come alive.
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