The Clothes on Their Backs by Linda Grant

Girls, do not get yourselves into a tizzy about this novel: it is not, perhaps, what you think it is. Let me explain. Linda Grant is a novelist who also writes about fashion, mostly in her blog, The Thoughtful Dresser, whose mantras are "the only thing worse than being skint is looking as if you're skint" and "a good handbag makes the outfit" (for the record, the first of these is total rot, but she might have a point about bags).

So when she decides to give her new book the title The Clothes on Their Backs, everyone gets a bit carried away. Her publisher arranges a load of suits and blouses artfully across its cover, and the glossy magazines ? not to mention the odd broadsheet reviewer ? all start trilling about how thoroughly exciting it is that, at last, someone has written a serious, grown-up novel about fashion.

All of which is to do Grant a huge disservice, I think, though I suppose it might help her to shift a few extra copies.

Her novel isn't really about clothes at all.

Sure, her narrator, Vivien Kovaks, being young and more than usually desperate to mark her place in the world, cares about hers quite a lot. The book is full of descriptions of preposterous snakeskin shoes and creaky leather jackets, and Grant understands the transformative power of a new dress better than most.

But this is not her subject. Her theme is human displacement: the way people must construct new identities in the lands, cold and forlorn, where they pitch up, and whether such constructions can ever overcome not only the suspicion of their new neighbours, but the weight of their own history. It takes more than a bolt of green silk or a natty suit to stick two fingers up to history.

Vivien Kovaks lives with her timid parents, Hungarian refugees, in a Marylebone mansion block. So far as she knows, she has no other living relatives.

Then, one day in 1963, he turns up: her Uncle Sandor, wearing an electric blue mohair suit, suede shoes and a fancy watch. If her parents are mice, this man is a "rhinoceros, coated in the mud of the river, goring and grabbing".

Her father, however, won't let him in and, very soon, it is apparent why, when Sandor, a character loosely inspired by Peter Rachman, is sent to prison. A decade-and-a-half later, as the National Front carefully places its Dr Martens-clad boot on the nation's fear glands, Vivien decides to find her uncle and, in so doing, her history. Is Sandor, as the papers said, "evil", or is he an irresistible life force? She is about to find out.

The Clothes on Their Backs is a return to the form of Grant's first and best novel, The Cast Iron Shore. Gripping and written with keen understatement, it manages to be a domestic coming-of-age story even as it takes in, via Sandor, the tumultuous sweep of the 20th century (in Sandor's run-down boarding house, Vivien doesn't only find her roots, her great-grandfather "with the curls in front of his ears", but animal sex, too).

It is, in other words, that rare thing, a novel of big ideas that never forgets to tell a story. Any frocks and bolero jackets you happen to come upon along the way are just the icing on the cake..

Synopsis by Foyles.co.uk

In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, Vivien, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, dressed in a mohair suit, with a diamond watch on his wrist and a girl in a leopard-skin hat on his arm. Why is Uncle Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival - both banal and heroic - and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live. Set against the backdrop of a London from the 1950s to the present day, The Clothes on Their Backs is a wise and tender novel about the clothes we choose to wear, the personalities we dress ourselves in, and about how they define us all.