The Clothes on Their Backs

In a red brick mansion block near 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? Vivien wants to know.

Set against the backdrop of 1970s London, the Clothes on Their Backs is a novel about survival – both everyday and heroic – and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.

Linda Grant

was born in Liverpool and now lives in London. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham First novel Prize and was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize. Her second novel When I Lived in Modern Times won the Orange Prize for Fiction. Linda Grant is also the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution; Remind Me Who I Am Again and The People on the Street: A Writer’s View of Israel.

Linda Grant's q & a

What sparked The Clothes On Their Backs?
The creation of two characters – Ervin and Berta Kovaks – who first put in an appearance in a very different novel, which had to be abandoned to make room for them.

Where and when is the novel set?
London in 1977

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
Berta Kovaks, the mother of the narrator, who always knows more than she says and understands more than she knows.

What's your favourite children's book and why?
Lorna Hill’s A Dream of Sadler’s Wells, because it, and the series which followed, were about teenagers who wanted to run away to London to live in mansion block flats and be artists of one kind or another.