Now in paperback from the acclaimed author of the Man Booker Prize-shortlisted novel The Clothes on Their Backs —a hugely satisfying, exuberant novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s. Stephen Newman’s children find it hard to believe that their father once dressed up in Marilyn Monroe’s furs, cooked acid at Oxford and lived with their mother, Andrea, in an anarchist collective. Quite often, Stephen finds it hard to believe himself. Born to immigrant parents in sunny Los Angeles, Stephen never imagined that he would spend his adult life under the gray skies of London, would marry and stay married and would watch his children grow into people he cannot fathom. Over 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. Linda Grant’s utterly absorbing novel about the generation that came of age during the 1970s reveals the truth about growing up and growing older and once again displays her uncanny ability to illuminate our times. “She offers apt commentary on the human denial about aging, the evanescence of happiness, the unparalleled value of loyal friendship, and the mysterious nature of marriage.” — Boston Globe 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. Sunshine Aged nine, Stephen standing outside the fur storage depot where his father works, his sturdy legs in shorts planted on Californian ground. Feet wide apart, shoulders up, arms behind his back, his neck sticking out from the collar of a checked shirt to which a narrow bow tie has been clipped, and his round, Charlie Brown head dusted with the dark shadow of a crew cut. All-American boy. “That day,” he told his children, “was the most exciting day of my life. That’s when I put on Marilyn Monroe’s fur stole. And got thumped on the head by my old man when he saw what I was doing.” The cold-storage warehouse took care of the fur coats of the movie stars. Stephen struggled to express memories he could find no words for, of walking along the lines of minks and sables, ocelots and ermines, allowed to carefully stroke their satin pelts, insert his own small arm into their dangling sleeves and feel the silken linings. His scrubbed hand was permitted briefly to enter the great surprise of a velvet pocket. “This coat belongs to Miss Bacall,” his father told him, in his immigrant accent. “This one to Miss Hayworth. The animal was a living thing, a beautiful creature that once was. And only a beautiful woman deserves to wear a coat like this.” If Marianne and her brother, Max, even as children cynically thought the world of their forefathers was unreal, made up by their father as a bedtime story, Stephen in his time had been far more credulous. For years he had believed that his father was on actual speaking terms with film stars, that he went to work every day with Deborah Kerr and Audrey Hepburn and Ava Gardner. Only after he made the momentous first visit to the cold-storage company, driving home with his father through Los Angeles suburbs, did he learn that the actresses never called to pick up or deposit their own furs; they had assistants to bring in the coats, the heat of the stars’ bodies still trapped in the linings, redolent of their sweat and perfume, the Joy, the Chanel No5, L’Heure Bleue. The brutal heavyset warehousemen regarded the coats as skin, animal pelts, weighty objects to be moved about in freezing conditions. They were all short, tough types, with large forearms and thinning hair. It was a shock, after the feminine world of home, his mother, his two sisters—their hair spray hanging in the air long after they had stood up from the mirror and face powder leaving scented trails scattered through the house; motes of lily of the valley and lilac whitened the rugs. Inside the warehouse, Stephen listened to his father’s explanations about why a fur needed to be kept under special conditions. The cool air and the darkness stopped the skins from drying out, the hairs from discoloring and held back the infestation of insects which could eat away at the garment. The duties of the employees included not just hanging the coats, but ensuring that they were not too close together, to prevent crushing. There was regular spraying of the unit with strong chemicals to control pests and rodents. Under no circumstances was a fur to be stored in a plastic bag, which could build up humidity and mold. The sight of a plastic bag in a cold-storage facility was the way, he said, you could detect an outfit run by a crook. After the lecture, Stephen ran down the racks of furs, which hung like heavy headless bodies in the darkness. Doubling back, he came to a rail of stoles which had just arr