Book description
In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a
sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present
by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle
appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and
a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sándor so
violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival
- both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the
complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce
desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to
the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel
about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress
ourselves in, and about how they define us all. Linda Grant is a
novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000
and the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006. She writes
for the Guardian, Telegraph and Vogue.
