The Clothes On Their Backs

The Clothes on Their Backs

A Novel

Linda Grant

WINNER OF THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTION
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

Linda Grant’s The Clothes on Their Backs explores the experiences of a Jewish family in postwar London, focusing on the tensions between respectable immigrant aspirations and the painful memories of displacement and persecution in Europe. Through the story of Vivien Kovacs and her estranged uncle, a notorious Hungarian Jewish racketeer, the novel examines Jewish identity, Holocaust trauma, assimilation, and the complex legacy of survival and social exclusion.

Vivien, sensitive and bookish, grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents. She loses herself in books and reinvents herself according to her favorite characters, but it is through clothes that she ultimately defines herself.

Against her father’s wishes, she forges a relationship with her estranged uncle, a notorious criminal, who, in his old age, wants to share his life story. As he reveals the truth about her family’s past, Vivien, having endured unbearable loss, learns how to be comfortable in her own skin and how to be alive in the world.

Linda Grant is a spectacularly humanizing writer whose morally complex characters explore the line between selfishness and self-preservation. In vivid and supple prose, Grant has created a powerful story of family, love, and the hold the past has on the present.

"There is nothing lightweight about its themes and yet it is so artfully constructed that you barely feel you're reading it at all, so fluid and addictive is the plot." —The Observer
"Gripping and written with keen understatement, it manages to be a domestic coming-of-age story even as it takes in the tumultuous sweep of the twentieth century." —The Evening Standard
"Like money, clothes have real, symbolic and psychological value. Linda Grant understands these dimensions implicitly. Stitched beautifully into the fabric of her latest novel is an acute understanding of the role clothes play in reflecting identity and self-worth.... Grant's own particular beam reveals the way we acquire our sense of self from what gets reflected back to us, either in the mirror or in our relationships with others. She is at home writing about the thrilling ripple of a skirt as she is charting social tensions." —The Sunday Telegraph
"We are what we wear because clothes reveal our personalities but, as Grant makes clear as she guides us through a dizzying ethical maze, they also conceal them....In this meticulously textured and complex novel, beneath Grant's surface dressing, what she is talking about is more than skin deep." —The Sunday Times
"A beautifully detailed character study, a poignant family history, and a richly evocative portrait..." —The Independent
"This vivid, enjoyable and consistently unexpected novel is like Anita Brookner with sex. Sándor's mix of the endearing and the repellent takes on a life beyond that of an absorbing and unexpectedly ambitious story." —The Telegraph
"This is a terrific novel, bursting with life and vivid characters." —The Mail on Sunday

About the Author

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool in 1951 to Russian and Polish Jewish immigrant parents, and has lived in London since 1984. A former journalist, she is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Her fiction returns again and again to Jewish history and identity: migration, displacement, assimilation, inherited secrets, and the question of what it means to belong in a new place.

Her Orange Prize-winning When I Lived in Modern Times follows a young Jewish hairdresser from London to Tel Aviv in the turbulent years before Israel’s founding. Still Here, longlisted for the Booker Prize, is set partly in Israel and explores home, memory and the pull of the past. The Clothes on Their Backs, shortlisted for the Booker Prize, centres on the daughter of Hungarian-Jewish refugees who conceal their origins, and on the uncle who unlocks her family’s hidden history. The Dark Circle, shortlisted for the Baileys Women’s Prize and the Wingate Prize, portrays Jewish teenage twins from London’s East End in a postwar Kent sanatorium. A Stranger City, winner of the Wingate Prize, weaves a Jewish Persian family into a portrait of contemporary London. Her most recent novel, The Story of the Forest (2023), is a multigenerational saga inspired by her own family’s story, spanning the pogroms of Eastern Europe and the lives of the descendants who left.

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