Synopses & Reviews
Now in paperback from the acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Clothes on Their Backs—a hugely satisfying, exuberant novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s.Lauded British writer Linda Grant has delivered an ambitious, multi-generational novel bursting with characters and life. We Had It So Good opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with Stephen Newman 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 over the span of forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realize that they have always existed in a fool’s paradise. The New York Times Book Review raves, “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.” Absorbing and utterly compelling, We Had It So Good illuminates our times and is “Grant’s best novel so far” (The Financial Times, London).
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
Synopsis
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.
Synopsis
Stephen Newman’s children find it hard to believe that their father once dressed up in Marilyn Monroe’s furs, cooked acid at Oxford and lived with their mother, Andrea, in an anarchist collective. Quite often, Stephen finds it hard to believe himself. Born to immigrant parents in sunny Los Angeles, Stephen never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the gray skies of London, would marry and stay married and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realize that they have always existed in a fool’s paradise. Linda Grant’s utterly absorbing novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s reveals the truth about growing up and growing older and once again displays her uncanny ability to illuminate our times.
Synopsis
Stephen Newman’s children find it hard to believe that their father once dressed up in Marilyn Monroe’s furs, cooked acid at Oxford and lived with their mother, Andrea, in an anarchist collective. Quite often, Stephen finds it hard to believe himself. Born to immigrant parents in sunny Los Angeles, Stephen never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the gray skies of London, would marry and stay married and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realize that they have always existed in a fool’s paradise. Linda Grant’s utterly absorbing novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s reveals the truth about growing up and growing older and once again displays her uncanny ability to illuminate our times.
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.