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Grant Linda

We Had It So Good: A Novel

Scribner

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A generational novel which opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with its American protagonist as a boy trying on Marilyn Monroe’s coat. When he grows up, Stephen goes to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, and stays on to avoid the draft and Vietnam.  He marries an Englishwoman, and they experience many of the things the baby boomer generation went through.  Later the torch is passed to their children.  In addition, Stephen’s father Si makes a dramatic reappearance after Stephen’s mother dies.  This is a big, capacious novel, bursting with wonderful characters and ideas.
The Clothes On Their Backs: A Novel

Scribner

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Orange Prize winner and shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2008, Linda Grant has created an enchanting portrait of a woman who, having endured unbearable loss, finds solace in the family secrets her estranged uncle reveals. In vivid and supple prose, Grant subtly constructs a powerful story of family, love, and the hold the past has on the present.

Vivien Kovacs, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from the world by her timid Hungarian refugee parents, who conceal the details of their history and shy away from any encounter with the outside world. She learns how to navigate British society from an eccentric cast of neighbors -- including a fading ballerina, a cartoonist, and a sad woman who wanders the city and teaches Vivien to be beautiful. 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 uncle, a notorious criminal and slum landlord, who, in his old age, wants to share his life story. As he exposes the truth about her family's past Vivien learns how to be comfortable in her own skin and how to be alive in the world.

Grant is a spectacularly humanizing writer whose morally complex characters explore the line between selfishness and self-preservation.


The Thoughtful Dresser: The Art of Adornment, the Pleasures of Shopping, and Why Clothes Matter

Scribner

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“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.
When I Lived in Modern Times

Plume

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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).

In April 1946, a 20-year-old East End London hairdresser named Evelyn Sert sets out for Palestine. "This is my story," she writes in When I Lived in Modern Times, which won Linda Grant the 2000 Orange Prize. "Scratch a Jew and you've got a story." Her account is no less complicated than that of any other displaced European Jew in the postwar years. Separated from her family, she searches for some kind of reliable identity in an inhospitable new land--and in shining, Bauhaus-influenced Tel Aviv, she finds that she is more English than Israeli. Lo and behold, she becomes Priscilla Jones, a peroxided Londoner with an absent policeman husband. She is at her most "real," it seems, when pretending, and revels in her ability to be entirely accepted among the English women whose hair she cuts and curls. Outside of their petty and casually anti-Semitic circle, meanwhile, she struggles with Hebrew, the heat, the unfamiliar food, and an alien way of life.

In Palestine, of course, the English are the enemy. Evelyn is soon drawn into a world of shifting identities, lies, and secrets by her passionate Zionist boyfriend, Johnny. Even then, she is never quite sure which side she is on, or where she belongs. All of this makes her a prototypical inhabitant of Linda Grant's Tel Aviv, a city of contradictions and of hope. More to the point, Grant's heroine is a fully believable figure, a chameleon of a kind readily recognizable to those of us who grew up as part of the seismic displacement of peoples that accompanied World War II--and, alas, to anyone who has been caught up in the more recent exoduses from Bosnia, Kosovo, and Albania. --Lisa Jardine


Remind Me Who I Am, Again

Granta UK

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An Orange Prize winner and Booker prize nominee tells the story of her mother's memory loss to Alzheimer's, and her own quest to not let her family history vanish along with it
 
Here, prizewinning author Linda Grant tells the story of her mother's gradual but devastating mental deterioration, her diagnosis as a victim of Alzheimer's disease, and her family's struggle to come to terms with the catastrophic impact of the disease. Immensely moving, at times darkly comic, and searingly honest, it combines biography and memoir in a unique examination of the profound questions of identity, memory, and autonomy that dementia raises.

Well Said: Pronunciation for Clear Communication

Heinle & Heinle Pub

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"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.

Grant Linda News




El Refugio gets $1K grant
Linda Martin, representing Bootheel Foundation (Western Bank), recently presented a $1000 check to Carol Thompson, El Refugio Inc. Board of Directors member and more »

State in 'race' for federal education aid
State in 'race' for federal education aidHARTFORD -- It's a race and state Education Commissioner Mark K. McQuillan is scrambling to win. and more »

So Long, 2009
Justice Assistance Grant. Linda Pease, chief development director at the ESU Foundation announces she accepted a new job for the Kansas 4-H Foundation.

Court reports for Jan. 2
22, 596 Linda Court, Kaukauna. Sentenced to 30 days in jail on a charge of disorderly conduct March 6 in Kaukauna. PERRY, Paul F.; 44, 723 W. Grant St.,

New Everson mayor to be sworn in Monday
New Everson mayor to be sworn in Monday For the first time in 20 years the borough of Everson has elected a new mayor. Ruth Shannon was elected to fill the and more »