Linda Grant appeared on Radio 4's Woman's Hour on Monday to discuss her breathtaking new novel The Clothes on Their Backs. Click here to listen again on the BBC website.

The UK's reviewers are already full of praise:

'If you read only one novel this year, make sure it is The Clothes on Their Backs' Sunday Express

'Read on one level her story is accessible, her characters neatly sketched. On a deeper level this is a coming-of-age story not only about insecure girls like Vivien, but about Britain in the 1970s, insecure about its evolving racial mix. She is as at home writing about the thrilling ripple of silk as she is charting social tensions. So: Prada or Primark? Rather enticingly, Grant provides the best of both' Sunday Telegraph

'Her heroine, Vivien Kovaks, slightly resembles a rawer, angrier version of one of Anita Brookner's dutiful daughters... such is the richness of Grant's plotting that the story encapsulates many untold narratives' The Times

'Gripping and written with keen understatement, it manages to be a domestic coming-of-age novel... It is, in other words, that rare thing, a novel of big ideas that never forgets to tell a story' Evening Standard

'A meticulously textured and complex novel' Sunday Times