Of course, James Joyce leaps quickly to mind. But there’s a lovely novel by the English writer Penelope Lively, that many people may not yet have discovered: “City of the Mind” published in 1991.

Set in modern London; its chief protagonist is an architect, Matthew Halland, who has a special love for historic preservation, and a special antagonism for a certain developer. But it’s not a small story about a predictable conflict between those two. It’s a journey that carries us on a constantly shifting current, as we experience London with Matthew as it is in the moment with him, as it had been, as it might be.

The story, for example, expands to touch an Elizabethan explorer, a Dickensian street urchin named Rose, and a WWII air-raid warden, among many others.

Ms. Lively invites us to meditate on those who came before us, those who will follow us, and how we may contribute to the lives of both.

An excerpt can’t really do it justice, but here is one long paragraph from the first chapter, just to give you a wee taste. I hope you’ll explore “City of the Mind” …

“And thus, driving through the city, he is both here and now, there and then. He carries yesterday with him, but pushes forward into today, and tomorrow, skipping as he will from one to the other. He is in London, on a May morning of the late twentieth century, but he is also in many other places, and at other times. He twitches the knob of his radio; New York speaks to him, five hours ago, is superseded by Australia tomorrow and presently by India this evening. He learns of events that have not yet taken place, of deaths that have not yet occurred. He is Matthew Halland, an English architect stuck in a traffic jam, a person of no great significance, and yet omniscient. For him, the world no longer turns; there is no day or night, everything and everywhere are instantaneous. He forges his way along Euston Road, in fits and starts, speeding up, then clogged again between panting taxis and a lorry with churning was-striped cement mixer. He is both trapped, and ranging free. He fiddles again with the radio, runs through a lexicon of French song, Arab exhortation, invective in some language he cannot identify. Halted once more, he looks sideways and meets the thoughtful gaze of Jane Austen (1775-1817), ten feet high on a poster, improbably teamed with Isambard Kingdom Bruenel and George Frederick Handel, all of them dead, gone, but doing well – live and kicking in his head and up there guarding the building site that will become the British Library. And then another car cuts in ahead of his, he hoots, accelerates, is channeled on in another licensed burst of speed. Jane Austen is replaced by St. Pancras.”

well get on yur lap top and scan for them pesky immigrants.