When I Lived In Modern Times

Description

It is April 1946. Evelyn Sert, 20 years old, a hairdresser from Soho, sails for Palestine, where Jewish refugees and idealists are gathering from across Europe to start a new life in a brand new country. In the glittering, cosmopolitan, Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv, anything seems possible - the new self, new Jew, new woman are all feasible. Evelyn, adept at disguises, reinvents herself as the bleached blonde Priscilla Jones. Immersed in a world of passionate idealism, she finds love, and with Johnny, her lover, finds herself at the heart of a very dangerous game.

Linda Grant was born in Liverpool in 1951. She was educated in Liverpool and studied at the University of York and in Canada. Her first novel, The Cast Iron Shore, won the David Higham Award in 1996 and was shortlisted for the Guardian Fiction Prize. She is the author of a memoir - Remind Me Who I Am Again and two further novels: When I Lived in Modern Times, which won the 2000 Orange Prize for fiction, and The Clothes on Their Backs, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize in 2008.