When I Lived in Modern Times

Name: When I Lived in Modern Times
ISBN: 9780452282926

A Novel

Linda Grant

WINNER OF THE WOMEN’S PRIZE ORANGE FOR FICTION (The Orange Prize)

In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and change when all things seem possible.

Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and disparate as the city itself. She falls in love with a man who is not what he seems when she becomes an unwitting spy for a nation fighting to be born.

“When I Lived in Modern Times is an unsentimental coming-of-age story of both a country and a young immigrant . . . that provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

“A stunning accomplishment…A vivid account of an elusive piece of recent history” —Chicago Sun-Times

“Informed, intelligent…vital, original.” —The New York Times

“Deeply moving…at once a beautifully rendered story of one woman’s coming of age, and a gripping portrait of the last days of British rule.” —Boston Globe

“Ms. Grant’s fast-paced novel succeeds on many levels. It recreates the historical era accurately with sophisicated prose and lively jests about the human condition.” —Dallas Morning News

“Appealing…[When I Lived in Modern Times] offers an unsentimental view of a young woman’s coming-of-age in a paradoxically ancient and newborn land. [A] compelling tale of a Middle Eastern adventure.” —US Weekly

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.