Ruth Rendell answers questions and reads from her 2008 novel Portobello at West End Books in Hampstead.

Portobello audiobook review

Jon Henley comes face to face with himself while reading Ruth Rendell's latest thriller.

'Vibrant' is the word often summoned to convey Portobello Road's singular blend of menace and modishness. Rendell's Portobello 'has a rich personality, vibrant, brilliant in colour … bizarre and splendid' with 'a spice of danger'.

London's Portobello is landlocked, but was named for the city of Puerto Bello, in the Caribbean, by an 18th century English Admiral who lost an ear to Spanish pirates. Rendell gives us this information at the beginning, suggesting that the unsettling nature of Portobello's origins pervades its existence even today.

The dropped wallet: Ruth Rendell's Portobello market reveals the vanity of gentrification.

Ruth Rendell is marvellous at psychological tension. She explores the creepiness of our unspoken urges and we read her novels to find out what mighthappen if we really let ourselves go. In her latest novel, Portobello, she takes that most chichi part of west London, Notting Hill, and burrows beneath its lively pastel-coloured surface. There she finds, cheek by jowl, poverty and wealth in a collection of individuals united by loneliness and longing.

Away from her fictitious small town of Kingsmarkham and its Inspector Wexford, Ruth Rendell has become one of the leading chroniclers of contemporary London. One of the fascinations of the city is the village character which some areas retain, bringing together strange specimens of humanity. Nowhere are there odder people or greater contrasts than in Notting Hill, which has attracted Rendell's beady eye in other novels.

Portobello is Ruth Rendell in a quiet mood with an absorbing story about strange inhabitants of Portobello Road market in London and its Notting Hill environs.