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We Had It So Good

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We Had It So Good
A Novel  
By Linda Grant
This edition: eBook, 336 pages
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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
"Grant really is gifted: her prose is accessible, vivid, upbeat, sensible and constantly thought-provoking. She pays attention to big issues (death, loss, love, genocide, terrorism, global warming), but never loses sight of the everyday details that define who we are…. This is a book about middle-class existence but it is also more than that--it shows how life, for most of us, just unfolds, inexorably, forming its own arc." --The Sunday Times (London)

-- The Sunday Times (London)

"My only complaint? I fear I may not read a better book all year." -The Evening Standard (London)

"Grant approaches these questions with her usual insight and subtlety and comes close to creating the perfect novel: one that never stops working to fill the reader's mind with good and difficult things, and which takes you to beautiful and often frightening places." -The Times (London)

"[Grant's] best novel so far…. it shows depth and feeling that both disturb and reassure."  -The Financial Times (London)

'We Had It So Good': Cherishing Lost Youth In London
WNYC, April 26, 2011
...British author Linda Grant's fifth novel, We Had It So Good , is a sobering exploration of what happens when four relatively privileged members of the swinging '60s grow up. It follows Stephen ...
We Had It So Good
New York Times, April 23, 2011
...would eventually compromise, wrinkle, suffer large and small defeats, seem foolish to their children? In her fifth novel, , Linda Grant traces the force of time on a group of friends from their hippie days in the Oxford of the late 1960s all ...
A Novel of Britain’s 60s Generation Growing Up
New York Times, April 22, 2011
...would eventually compromise, wrinkle, suffer large and small defeats, seem foolish to their children? In her fifth novel, We Had It So Good, Linda Grant traces the force of time on a group of friends from their hippie days in the Oxford of ...
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