We Had It So Good

Lauded British writer Linda Grant has delivered an ambitious, multi-generational novel bursting with characters and life. We Had It So Good opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with Stephen Newman 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 over the span of forty years he and his friends have built lives of comfort and success, until the events of late middle age and the new century force them to realize that they have always existed in a fool’s paradise. The New York Times Book Review raves, “Grant’s ability to gather up a pivotal scene with a loose hand, her grace in hopscotching through the decades, her freedom in moving among perspectives and the clear-eyed empathy she displays for her characters are wonderfully open-ended, never forced into narrative conventions or easy epiphanies.” Absorbing and utterly compelling, We Had It So Good illuminates our times and is “Grant’s best novel so far” (The Financial Times, London).
ISBN:9781451617450