Add Linda Grant to your bookshelves - a unique, award-winning author whose books are compelling, deeply moving and full of furious energy.

A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Linda Grant won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000, the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage in 2006 and holds honorary doctorates from the University of York and Liverpool John Moores University. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award; The Dark Circle was shortlisted for the 2017 Women’s Prize for Fiction; A Stranger City won the 2000 Wingate Literary Prize and The Story of the Forest was longlisted for the 2023 Wingate Literary Prize and shortlisted for the Orwell Prize for Political Fiction, 2023.

'Whether the scene is Liverpool in the Blitz, a potato-chip factory in the prairies or a seedy hotel room in Hanoi, the writing is immediate . . . Grant approaches each character with insight and a tart sympathy’ Hilary Mantel, Literary Review

‘Grant is so good at conjuring up atmosphere and writes with earthy vivacity’ Anthony Gardner, Mail on Sunday

'One of our best modern authors . . . I've never been able to stop reading any of her work once I've started' Peter Hitchens, Mail on Sunday

'Grant is so accomplished a novelist of recent social history . . . tender and touching' Suzi Feay, Literary Review

This bundle includes four of Grant's novels: 

The Clothes on Their Backs

First published in 2008, The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize and went on to win the Orange Prize in the same year.

'A vivid, enjoyable and consistently unexpected novel' Daily Telegraph

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.

'A beautifully written and truly moving book about the experience of growing up in Britain as a second generation immigrant' Express

We Had It So Good

This multilayered novel, first published by Virago in 2011, is a thoughtful and engaging story of a London family from the late sixties to the early 2000s. We Had It So Good examines a generation which, in her own words, 'never fully understood its own fortune'. It is a novel of observation – Grant expertly captures the fervour and the raggedness of real life.

'Compelling, perceptive and deeply humane' Daily Mail

'Grant comes close to creating the perfect novel' The Times

Born to hardworking immigrant parents in sunny, suburban Los Angeles, Stephen Newman never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the grey skies of North London, would marry Andrea for convenience 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 realise that they have always existed in a fool's paradise.

'Like the best novels, it makes you examine your own moral compass alongside that of its characters' Observer

Upstairs at the Party

‘If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend. If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don’t know how to explain.’

In the early seventies, a glamorous and androgynous couple known as Evie/Stevie appear out of nowhere on the isolated concrete campus of a new university. To a group of teenagers experimenting with radical ideas, they seem blown back from the future, unsettling everything and uncovering covert desires. But their mesmerising, flamboyant self-expression hides deep anxieties and hidden histories.

'Compelling right to the very last page' List

For Adele, who also has something to conceal, Evie becomes an obsession – an obsession which becomes lifelong after the night of Adele’s twentieth birthday party. What happened that evening and who was complicit are questions that have haunted Adele ever since. A set of school exercise books might reveal everything, but they have been missing for the past forty years.

From summers in 1970s Cornwall to London in the twenty-first century, long after she has disappeared, Evie will go on challenging everyone’s ideas of how their lives should turn out.

With her hallmark humour, intelligence and boldness, Linda Grant has written a powerful and captivating novel about secrets and the moments that shape our lives.

'A wonderfully and perceptively written story, which rings utterly true, and as a consequence lifts the spirits' Guardian

The Dark Circle 

 Published in November 2016, The Dark Circle tells the story of tubercular East London twins, Lenny and Miriam Lynskey, sent to convalesce in a post-World War II sanatorium in Kent. It was shortlisted for the then Bailey's Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2017.
‘Extraordinarily affecting’ Alex Preston, Observer
‘Grant brings the 1950s – that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation – into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus’ Christobel Kent, Guardian

All over Britain, life is beginning again now the war is over, but for Lenny and Miriam, East End London teenage twins who have been living on the edge of the law, life is suspended – they’ve contacted tuberculosis. It’s away to the sanatorium – newly opened by the NHS – in deepest Kent for them where they will meet a very different world: among other patients, an aristocract, a young university grad, a mysterious German woman and an American merchant seaman with big ideas about love and rebellion. They are not the only ones whose lives will be changed forever.

‘Grant is so good at conjuring up atmosphere and writes with earthy vivacity’ Anthony Gardner, Mail on Sunday
‘Read this fine, persuasive, moving novel and contemplate’ John Sutherland, The Times