The Clothes on Their Backs

Shortlisted for the Man Booker and longlisted for the Orange Prize, 2008. 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 Sßndor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home.