The Clothes on Their Backs

In her new novel, Linda Grant writes about a sensitive girl growing up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. The dramatic arrival of a glamorous uncle, violently unwelcome by her parents, changes everything. A story of concealed pasts, stark choices and how the clothes we wear define us all. 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.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool, the child of Russian and Polish Jewish immigrants. From 1995 to 2000 she was a feature writer for the Guardian, where between 1997 and 1998 she also had a weekly column in G2. She is the author of Sexing the Millennium: A Political History of the Sexual Revolution; The Cast Iron Shore (the David Higham First Novel Award); Remind Me Who I am Again, an account of her mother's decline into dementia and the role that memory plays in creating family history (MIND/Allen Lane Book of the Year and Age Concern Book of the Year); When I Lived in Modern Times, set in Tel Aviv in the last years of the British Mandate (winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction and shortlisted for the Jewish Quarterly Prize and the Encore Prize); Still Here ( longlisted for the Booker Prize). Her non-fiction work, The People On The Street: A Writer's View of Israel, published in 2006, won the Lettre Ulysses Prize for Literary Reportage. Her latest novel, The Clothes On Their Backs, is published in February 2008.

Rachel Seiffert is the award winning author of the Booker-shortlisted The Dark Room and an acclaimed collection of short stories, Field Study.  Her latest novel, Afterwards, was longlisted for the Orange Prize in 2007.