Hisham Matar on the Outsider in London

The narrator of “New Shoes” is a man who left his home in Cairo when he was eighteen, and, after four years living and working in various places in Italy and France, has been in London for eight years, where he now owns a string of small newsagent shops. Why did you choose London as the place he would settle?I was interested in a person who is living in two places at once: one real, and the other desired. I have lived in London for the majority of my life, a city that is and has long been, of course, a place of refuge for people like my protagonist, who, no matter how long they remain here, can feel themselves a “guest,” as Virginia Woolf calls Joseph Conrad in her obituary of the author (he had, by that stage, spent forty-six years in Britain). All this to say that London famously remains