The Dark Circle: Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 2017

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Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction 'Extraordinarily affecting' Alex Preston, Observer 'This is a novel whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas . . . Grant brings the 1950s - that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation - into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus' - Christobel Kent Guardian All over Britain life is beginning again now the war is over but for Lenny and Miriam, East End London teenage twins who have been living on the edge of the law, life is suspended - they've contacted tuberculosis. It's away to the sanatorium - newly opened by the NHS - in deepest Kent for them where they will meet a very different world: among other patients, an aristocract, a young university grad, a mysterious German woman and an American merchant seaman with big ideas about love and rebellion. They are not the only ones whose lives will be changed forever. 'Grant is so good at conjuring up atmosphere and writes with earthy vivacity'- Anthony Gardner Mail on Sunday 'Read this fine, persuasive, moving novel and contemplate' John Sutherland, The Times

Linda Grant is author of four non-fiction books and nine novels. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000. The Clothes on Their Backs was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008 and went on to win the South Bank Show Award. . Her latest novel, The Story of the Forest, is published in 2023. She is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and holds honorary doctorates from the University of York and John Moores University.

Exhilaratingly good . . . This is a novel whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas . . . Grant brings the 1950s - that odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation - into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus - Guardian Contemporary issues linger ominously in Grant's margins, silently enriching what's already an astonishingly good period piece - Independent A rich, engaging novel, further proof that Grant can conjure up a special mood in a specific period with great humour - Sunday Telegraph An extraordinary depiction of the physical and emotional experience of illness. She marvellously communicates the poignancy of youth and sexuality in the presence of impending death. Grant's voice is unlike any other writer; so immediate and engaged even when writing historical fiction