• Thursday February 24th – Daunts Books event
• Saturday March 5th – World Book Night
• Sunday March 6th – Jewish Book Week
• Sunday April 10th – Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival
• Sunday May 8th – Brighton Festival

Details as follows:

Thursday February 24th

In conversation with Daunt Books.

Venue: Keats House
Time: 7.00 p.m.
Tickets: £5 (inc. wine) via 020 7794 8206 or www.dauntbooks.co.uk

Saturday March 5th – World Book Night

Q&A and signing.

Venue: Hornsey Library
Time: 5.30 p.m.
Tickets: TBC (please contact the library on 020 8489 1118 / 1429 for more information, or email library.service@haringey.gov.uk)

Sunday March 6th – Jewish Book Week

In Conversation with Joan Bakewell.

Venue: Royal National Hotel, London
Time: 3.30 p.m.
Tickets: £10 via www.jewishbookweek.com

Sunday April 10th – Sunday Times Oxford Literary Festival

In conversation with Rachel Hore and Joanne Harris.

Venue: Corpus Christi College, Oxford
Time: 12.00 p.m.
Tickets: TBC – see www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com for updates.

The Jilted Generation? In conversation with Ed Howker, Aaron Porter and Will Hutton.

Venue: Christ Church HSBC Premier Marquee
Time: 4.00 p.m.
Tickets: £10 via www.oxfordliteraryfestival.com

Sunday May 8th – Brighton Festival

In conversation with Naomi Alderman.

Venue / Time / Tickets : All currently TBC – sign up for updates at www.brightonfestival.org

The other guests on this week’s show are Simon Sebag Montifiore and Jane Shilling. The show will be broadcast on Sky Arts 1 HD at 7.00 p.m. on Thursday February 10th and will be available to watch again via the Sky Arts website afterwards.

You can also watch two exclusive video interview clips with Linda, in which she talks about how she became an author and how her schooling informed and influenced her work.

We Had It So Good tells the story of Stephen Newman. In 1968 he arrives in England from California. Sent down from Oxford, he hurriedly marries his English girlfriend Andrea to avoid returning to America and the draft board. Over the next forty years they and their friends build lives of middle-class success until the events of late middle-age and the new century force them to realise that their fortunate generation has always lived in a fool’s paradise.

Here’s a short extract to whet your appetite. Visit the books section of the site for more information about We Had It So Good and to read a longer extract from the book.

Sunshine

Aged nine, Stephen standing outside the fur-storage depot where his father works, his sturdy legs in shorts planted on Californian ground. Feet wide apart, shoulders up, arms behind his back, his neck sticking out from the collar of a checked shirt to which a narrow bow-tie has been clipped, and his round Charlie Brown head dusted with the dark shadow of a crew-cut. All-American boy.

‘That day,’ he told his children, ‘was the most exciting day of my life. That’s when I put on Marilyn Monroe’s fur stole. And got thumped on the head by my old man when he saw what I was doing.’

The cold-storage warehouse took care of the fur coats of the movie stars. Stephen struggled to express memories he could find no words for, of walking along the lines of minks and sables, ocelots and ermines, allowed to carefully stroke their satin pelts, insert his own small arm into their dangling sleeves and feel the silken linings. His scrubbed hand was permitted briefly to enter the great surprise of a velvet pocket.

‘This coat belongs to Miss Bacall,’ his father told him, in his immigrant accent, ‘this one to Miss Hayworth. The animal was a living thing, a beautiful creature that once was. And only a beautiful woman deserves to wear a coat like this.’

If Marianne and her brother Max, even as children, cynically thought the world of their forefathers was unreal, made up by their father as a bedtime story, Stephen in his time had been far more credulous. For years he had believed that his father was on actual speaking terms with film stars, that he went to work every day with Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Only after he made the momentous first visit to the cold-storage company, driving home with his father through Los Angeles suburbs, did he learn that the actresses never called to pick up or deposit their own furs: they had assistants to bring in the coats, the heat of the stars’ bodies still trapped in the linings, redolent of their sweat and perfume, the Joy, the No. 5, L’Heure Bleu.

The brutal heavy-set warehousemen regarded the coats as skin, animal pelts, weighty objects to be moved about in freezing conditions. They were all short, tough types, with large forearms and thinning hair. It was a shock, after the feminine world of home, his mother, his two sisters – their hairspray hanging in the air long after they had stood up from the mirror, and face powder leaving scented trails scattered through the house; motes of lily-of-the-valley and lilac whitened the rugs.

Inside the warehouse Stephen listened to his father’s explanations about why a fur needed to be kept under special conditions. The cool air and the darkness stopped the skins drying out, the hairs discolouring and held back the infestation of insects, which could eat away at the garment. The duties of the employees included not just hanging the coats but ensuring that they were not too close together, to prevent crushing. There was regular spraying of the unit with strong chemicals to control pests and rodents. Under no circumstances was a fur to be stored in a plastic bag, which could build up humidity and mould. The sight of a plastic bag in a cold-storage facility was the way, he said, you could detect an outfit run by a crook.

After the lecture, Stephen ran down the racks of furs which hung like heavy headless bodies in the darkness. Doubling back, he came to a rail of stoles that had just arrived for treatment and storage. His father was on the other side of the room smoking the stump of a cigar, his knee raised, his foot resting on a wooden crate, a small, skinny man – with the endurance, his wife said, of an ox – who arrived in America all by himself aged twelve and who barely grew afterwards, as if the soil of home in Europe had given him all the nutrients he needed. She was a head taller than him in her nylons, and her hair rose even higher, blueblack and held up with a butterfly comb.

The garment that lay draped around the hanger was slipping off, and before it reached the floor Stephen raised his arms to catch it. The fur body fell, weirdly, he thought, both heavy and light, and with a fragrance of hot pearls. The hairs brushed his face and tickled him. ‘I had to try that thing on,’ he told his children. ‘I don’t know what came over me, but you know all kids love fancy dress and maybe it was just Hallowe’en come early.’

The weight of the pale mink bore down on his thin arms. He came walking out towards a mirror so he could see what kind of being he had been transformed into. His father turned and saw his only son draped and twirling on his toes in Marilyn Monroe’s champagne-mink stole. Stephen thought he was taking the opportunity to try out transformation. He was exercising his birthright, the American capacity to be reborn.

A hard whack came from behind and he heard his father utter imprecations in his native language, in which there were few vowels and many syllables that seemed to get stuck in the speaker’s throat, choking him.

Listen to the show at www.bbc.co.uk. The lengthy and wide-ranging discussion of We Had It So Good kicks in round about 11.58 or so.

Here is a selection of the ones we’ve seen so far:

‘Grant is a lucid, stimulating writer and this is a deep reflection on the life span of the baby boomers. This subject could, of course, be deadly in the wrong hands, but Grant really is gifted: her prose is accessible, vivid, upbeat, sensible and constantly thought-provoking. She pays attention to big issues but never loses sight of the everyday details that define who we are. Again and again she takes the parochial and extrapolates. It is this talent that animated The Clothes on Their Backs. Grant demands that we think about the mechanisms of life: the irritating details that make us who and what we are, and what they really mean. Ultimately, it is this intensity that lifts the novel above others of its ilk.’
– Lucy Atkins, The Sunday Times

‘This is a gripping family saga stylishly told. Postwar California, Oxford and London are re-created superbly and brightly. Yet big ideas surface continually and make this much more than a readable trip down one man’s life path. Is family history a subject that you can ever really learn? What is a Jew and what is an Englishman? Is it wrong to marry someone you don’t think you will stay with for ever? Grant approaches these questions with her usual insight and subtlety and comes close to creating the perfect novel: one that never stops working to fill the reader’s mind with good and difficult things, and which takes you to beautiful and often frightening places.’
– Melissa Katsoulis, The Times

‘… her best novel so far. This is a serious, thoughtful novel that asks questions Grant has asked before, but does so in a way that perfectly matches form and content. That perfect match doesn’t make for easeful or complacent work; on the contrary, it show depth and feeling that both disturb and reassure.’
- Lesley McDowell, The Financial Times

‘Grant is never afraid to confront big ideas in her books, and this is no exception. That Grant can so vividly encapsulate the lives and times of her characters in less than 350 pages is testimony to her skill as a writer and perceptive observer of human behaviour. We Had it So Good is a portrait of a marriage and a family, and the compromises and bittersweet truths that come with age.’
– Catherine Heaney, Irish Times

‘Grant weaves in the stories of the generations on either side of the baby-boomers. Grant explores these ineluctable familial ties over four decades, suggesting that we may never really know our parents and exploring the lies parents tell and the truths their children doubt. Grant has an effortless style – no metaphor ever feels forced – and her many ideas linger with you long after you have finished reading. The novel is pleasingly unpredictable too – I never once foresaw a plot development. My only complaint? I fear I may not read a better book all year.’
– Rosamun Urwin, The Evening Standard

The interview, which was published on Saturday January 15th, covers Linda’s life, work and background, particularly in the context of the inspiration behind her new novel, We Had It So Good.

Read the full interview online at www.guardian.co.uk/culture.

You can listen to the interview via the Front Row Archive (interview starts round about 22.30).

Her new novel, We Had It So Good perfectly captures the emotional pulse of the country – then and today. It tells many truths, from the fragility of our dreams to how little we know of our parents until it is too late. It’s already hailed as ‘blisteringly good’ (Red) and ‘A must read for fans of intelligent fiction’ (Elle).

Linda recorded a video for Virago to introduce the book and explore some of her motivation for writing it:

For more information on the Virago Book Club, visit www.viragobooks.net/bookclub.