We Had It So Good A Novel

A generational novel which opens memorably in a fur storage house in Los Angeles with its American protagonist as a boy 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 they experience many of the things the baby boomer generation went through. Later the torch is passed to their children. In addition, Stephen's father Si makes a dramatic reappearance after Stephen's mother dies. This is a big, capacious novel, bursting with wonderful characters and ideas.

Linda Grant is a novelist and journalist. She won the Orange Prize for Fiction in 2000 and the Lettre Ulysses Award for the Art of Reportage in 2006. She writes for the Guardian, Telegraph, and Vogue. She lives in North London.