Clothes on Their Backs
By Linda Grant

The Clothes on Their Backs

By (author) Linda Grant

Format: Paperback / softback

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Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant

Orange Prize Winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Llinda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals. Vivien Kovacs, sensitive and bookish, grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents. She loses herself in books and reinvents herself according to her favorite characters, but it is through clothes that she ultimately defines herself. Against her father's wishes, she forges a relationship with her estranged uncle, a notorious criminal, who, in his old age, wants to share his life story. As he reveals the truth about her family's past, Vivien, having endured unbearable loss, learns how to be comfortable in her own skin and how to be alive in the world. Linda Grant is a spectacularly humanizing writer whose morally complex characters explore the line between selfishness and self-preservation. In vivid and supple prose, Grant has created a powerful story of family, love, and the hold the past has on the present.

"There is nothing lightweight about its themes and yet it is so artfully constructed that you barely feel you're reading it at all, so fluid and addictive is the plot." -- "The Observer"

ISBN: 9781439142363
ISBN-10: 143914236X
Classification: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945)
Format: Paperback / softback (211mm x 137mm x 25mm)
Pages: 293
Imprint: Scribner Book Company
Publisher: Scribner Book Company
Publish Date: 25-Nov-2008
Country of Publication: United States

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Books By Author Linda Grant

Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler by Linda Grant

Some Girls, Some Hats and Hitler, Hardback (October 2012)

Originally published: Suffolk: N. Spearman, 1984.

We Had it So Good, Paperback (January 2012)

* Linda Grant's 'best novel yet' (FT)- the thoughtful and engaging story of a London family from the late sixties to the present, out now in paperback

Remind Me Who I am, Again by Linda Grant

Remind Me Who I am, Again, Paperback (January 2011)

'A skilful, moving, even humorous book. It is more than an elegy for a lost mother or the charting of one human being's decline ... It is an investigation of memory, which concludes that "Memory, I have come to understand, is everything, it's life itself"' Scotland on Sunday