It's amazing how similar this is, in its way, to a lot of epic fantasies. There's no magic or dragons or anything like that, but the generational aspect of it is identical. Which in a way is a shame, as it's one of the things I find most frustrating about epic fantasies...

London is less a novel than it is a series of linked novellas, spanning moments in the city's history over two millennia. It follows the fortunes of a small group of families - the genealogical table in the front is invaluable in sorting them out - and that's where the fantasy similarity comes in. No matter how many generations there are between Ancestor X and Descendant Y, they share the same physical characteristics and, more often the not, the same personality. (Take a look at the Ohmsford and Leah character types in Terry Brooks' Shannara series if you want to see the fantasy version of this technique.) And honestly, competent though the storytelling is, it gets repetitive fast. If you're going to write about (essentially) the same characters for 1300 bloody pages, I want to see more character development than I got. Otherwise it's just a series of episodic adventures, and there's nothing wrong with that, exactly, but they're adventures in service of comprehensiveness rather than story. If ever there was a book that needed to kill off some of its darlings, this is it. There's only so many times I can read about a Silversleeves' giant nose before I'm sick to death of the whole beaky family.