The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant

'My parents had brought me up to be a mouse. Out of gratitude to England, which gave them refuge, they chose to be mice-people, and this condition of mouse-hood was what they hoped for me too. And whatever Uncle Sandor was, he was no mouse. He was a rhinoceros, coated in the mud of the river, goring and grabbing'. Set against the backdrop of 1970s London, in a red-brick mansion block near Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl, grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then a glamorous uncle appears, in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? Vivien wants to know. This is a story about survival, both everyday and heroic, and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. This 2008 Virago Paperback is in good condition.

ISBN: 9781844085415 SKU: 1380722 Note: Any image shown is from a stock photo and is not the actual book.

Location: Fiction