The Clothes On Their Backs - Softcover

In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents, surrounded by well-to-do neighbours living mysterious, enthralling lives. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin pill-box hat on his arm. But why is this man so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? The young Vivien begins to push against the constraints of home and escapes to university. But a shocking event soon sends her back to her parents' home and to her uncle Sandor, only recently released from prison. Volunteering to help him write his life-story, she learns about the concealed past and the stark choices faced by those intent on survival. As history reveals itself, so too does the London of the 1970s and Vivien comes to understand how the clothes we wear define us.

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, and was longlisted for the Man Booker in 2002 for Still Here. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award.