Linda Grant

At the beginning of the 1990s, Linda Grant's mother, Rose, was diagnosed with Dementia. In Remind Me Who I Am, Again Linda Grant tells the story of Rose's illness and tries to reconstruct the history of their Jewish immigrant family, stalking them from Russia and Poland to New York and London. Writing with humour and great tenderness, Grant explores profound questions about memory, autonomy and identity, and asks if we can ever really know our parents.

* Virago are reissuing this wonderful first novel by Man Booker-shortlisted author Linda Grant

"You can't have depths without surfaces," says Linda Grant in her lively and provocative new book, The thoughtful Dresser, a thinking woman's guide to what we wear. For centuries, an interest in clothes has been dismissed as the trivial pursuit of vain, empty-headed women. Yet, clothes matter, whether you are interested in fashion or not, because how we choose to dress defines who we are. How we look and what we wear tells a story. Some stories are simple, like the teenager trying to fit in, or the woman turning fifty renouncing invisibility. Some are profound, like that of the immigrant who arrives in a new country and works to blend in by changing the way she dresses, or of the woman whose hat saved her life in Nazi Germany. The Thoughtful Dresser celebrates the pleasure of adornment and is an elegant meditation on our relationship with what we wear and the significance of clothes as the most intimate but also public expressions of our identity.

Alix, arrogant, middle-aged and angry comes home to the derelict port of Liverpool as her mother lies dying. Irritably resigned to living alone for the rest of her life she suddenly finds herself erotically attracted to a stranger. Joseph is an American architect who has come to the city to build a hotel. Refusing to accept that his wife has left him or the trauma of a war he once fought in, the question is whether these survivors of the battles of the Seventies are meant for each other or not. And what happened to a factory in Dresden which long ago made the perfect face cream . . .'Perhaps her most accessible novel to date ... Grant's prose is blunt, honest, yet often beautiful and bitingly funny. Equally comfortable discussing concepts of justice and grooming routinme, the voices Grant creates are striking and authentic. Her characters are irascible, witty, fierce, and full of the contradictions and blind spots that make them wholly human. This is a compelling and satisfying novel' Rachel Seiffert, author of The Dark Room

The brilliant new novel by Orange Prize winner, Linda Grant, about the legacies of history, longlisted for the Orange Prize, 2008 and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, 2008

* A fascinating investigation into the relationship between people and clothes, on a human rather than design level

The Well Said series offers a lively communicative approach to building and improving pronunciation and speaking skills through strategies development and abundant confidence-building activities.

Orange Prize Winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Llinda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals. Vivien Kovacs, 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.

The further away anyone was from that block of Ben Yehuda street, the easier it seemed to find a solution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians, that stubborn mess in the centre of the Middle East and the more I studied these solutions, the more I thought that they depended for their implementation on a population of table football men, painted in the colours of the two teams: blue and white for the Israelis, green, red and black for the Palestinians. All the international community had to do was to twist the levers and the little players would kick and swing and send the ball into the net, to victory' One block of a Tel Aviv street is the starting point for Linda Grant's exploration of the inner dynamics of Israelis - not the government and its policies, but the people themselves, in all their variety. Iraqi shop-keepers, Teenage soldiers, Mob bosses, Tunisian-born settlers, Russian scientists, and the father of the child victim of a suicide bomber are some of the people she meets.

Evelyn Serth befinner sig på ett fartyg i Medelhavet med destination Palestina. Det är april 1946 och arméer av män och kvinnor är i rörelse genom Europa för att försöka komma hem igen - om de har ett hem att återvända till. Den unga hårfrisörskan från London skall snart anlända till den glittrande bauhausstaden Tel Aviv, där judiska flyktingar och idealister från hela Europa samlas för att skapa inte bara den nya juden utan också ett helt nytt modernt medvetande vid Medelhavets kust. Tillsammans med sin älskare Johnny dras Evylyn in i kampen för ett fritt judiskt hemland, men alla hennes drömmar verkar kunna gå samma öde till mötes som stadens moderna, arkitektoniskt fulländade byggnader som snabbt förfaller i det heta klimatet.

Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 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).