Synopses & Reviews
A generational novel which opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with its American protagonist as a boy trying on Marilyn Monroe’s coat. When he grows up, Stephen goes to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and stays on to avoid the draft and Vietnam. He marries an Englishwoman, and they experience many of the things the baby boomer generation went through. Later the torch is passed to their children. In addition, Stephen’s father Si makes a dramatic reappearance after Stephen’s mother dies. This is a big, capacious novel, bursting with wonderful characters and ideas.
Review
“Grant’s ability to gather up a pivotal scene with a loose hand, her grace in hopscotching through the decades, her freedom in moving among perspectives and the clear-eyed empathy she displays for her characters are wonderfully open-ended, never forced into narrative conventions or easy epiphanies.” -New York Times Book Review
Review
"Grant really is gifted: her prose is accessible, vivid, upbeat, sensible and constantly thought-provoking. She pays attention to big issues (death, loss, love, genocide, terrorism, global warming), but never loses sight of the everyday details that define who we are…. This is a book about middle-class existence but it is also more than that—it shows how life, for most of us, just unfolds, inexorably, forming its own arc." -
The Sunday Times (London)
Review
“My only complaint? I fear I may not read a better book all year.
" -The Evening Standard (London)
Review
“Grant approaches these questions with her usual insight and subtlety and comes close to creating the perfect novel: one that never stops working to fill the reader’s mind with good and difficult things, and which takes you to beautiful and often frightening places.
" -The Times (London)
Review
“[Grant’s] best novel so far…. it shows depth and feeling that both disturb and reassure.” -
The Financial Times (London)
Review
“She offers apt commentary on the human denial about aging, the evanescence of happiness, the unparalleled value of loyal friendship, and the mysterious nature of marriage.” —Boston Globe
About the Author
Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for the Art of Reportage in 2006. Her most recent novel, The Clothes on Their Backs, was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008. She writes for The Guardian, The Telegraph, and Vogue.