In 1968 Stephen Newman arrives in England from California. Sent down from Oxford, he hurriedly marries his English girlfriend Andrea to avoid returning to America and the draft board. Over the next forty years they and their friends build lives of middle-class success until the events of late middle-age and the new century force them to realise that their fortunate generation has always lived in a fool's paradise.
John Crace's Digested Read — The Guardian
Reviews
The Times
Melissa Katsoulis
"This is a gripping family saga stylishly told. Postwar California, Oxford and London are re-created superbly and brightly. Yet big ideas surface continually and make this much more than a readable trip down one man’s life path. Is family history a subject that you can ever really learn? What is a Jew and what is an Englishman? Is it wrong to marry someone you don’t think you will stay with for ever? Grant approaches these questions with her usual insight and subtlety and comes close to creating the perfect novel: one that never stops working to fill the reader’s mind with good and difficult things, and which takes you to beautiful and often frightening places."
15/01/2011
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The Sunday Times
Lucy Atkins
"Grant is a lucid, stimulating writer and this is a deep reflection on the life span of the baby boomer. This subject could, of course, be deadly in the wrong hands, but Grant really is gifted: her prose is accessible, vivid, upbeat, sensible and constantly thought-provoking. She pays attention to big issues (death, loss, love, genocide, terrorism, global warming), but never loses sight of the everyday details that define who we are."
16/01/2011
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The Evening Standard
Rosamund Urwin
"Grant has an effortless style — no metaphor ever feels forced — and her many ideas linger with you long after you have finished reading. The novel is pleasingly unpredictable too — I never once foresaw a plot development. My only complaint? I fear I may not read a better book all year."
13/01/2011
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The Financial Times
Lesley McDowell
"...her best novel so far... This is a serious, thoughtful novel that asks questions Grant has asked before, but does so in a way that perfectly matches form and content. That perfect match doesn’t make for an easeful or complacent work; on the contrary, it shows depth and feeling that both disturb and reassure."
17/01/2011
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The Independent on Sunday
Rachel Hore
"Grant allows [all her characters] to be fully themselves rather than vehicles for her ideas … [She] is building up an important fictional oeuvre that offers a fresh and perceptive commentary on our times. I would not be surprised to see this new novel on shortlists in 2011."
23/01/2011
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The Daily Mail
Michael Arditti
"There could be no finer guide than Grant to both the exuberance and the ideology of this much mythologized decade … [A] compelling, perceptive and deeply humane novel … excellent"
21/01/2011
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The Daily Telegraph
Jane Shilling
"[The novel relies] for its emotional impact on the painstaking accumulation of detail rather than a driving narrative. Her delineation of character is judicious rather than passionate – so that even characters in extremis live out their dramas at a safe distance from the reader’s heart."
16/01/2011
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Times Literary Supplement
Mira Mattar
"That Linda Grant writes well is not in doubt — her characters are finely detailed, from what they wear and how they speak to their deepest secrets — but her writing lacks urgency."
14/01/2011
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The Guardian
Joanna Briscoe
"It is most interesting and illuminating as an essay, a portrait of a generation. In fact, it is largely a novel of observation — of acute observation — that reads in many ways like an extended piece of journalism with a plot."
22/01/2011
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The New Statesman
Leo Robson
"As a piece of narration, the book is scrappy and unfocused. As a novel of ideas, it is ham-fisted … Yet the book is gripping."
03/02/2011
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