“The fields from Islington to Marybone, /To Primrose Hill and Saint John’s Wood, /Were builded over with pillars of gold; /And there Jerusalem’s pillars stood.” Look round the area of London where William Blake once envisioned “pillars of gold,” and today you’ ll find a landscape anything but golden; Kentish Town is just the sort of urban battlefield where, when one’s neighbor seems unaccountably to be missing from her home, it is all too easy to start fearing the worst. In this 1992 novel, Alice Thomas Ellis craftily traces the ripples of unease a neighbor’s absence occasions. Ellis’s briskly lyrical prose strikes sparks from urban grimnesses, and her gift for witty dialogue turns her muddled urbanites’ chatter into a wry exposé of contemporary anxieties. With a new Afterword by Thomas Meagher.