New Favorite Novel Just Read by Penelope

I have just happily read my way through Linda Grant's latest novel : We Had It So Good- just published by Virago. This book is as satisfying as her last book was not satisfying, - The Clothes on Our Backs, but this is another novel, that perhaps is closer to our hearts.

Basically the novel focuses on the life of an American who sails to England (on the same boat as Bill Clinton, also with a Rhodes scholarship)- arrives in Oxford in the hippies sixties and marries one of the hippie chicks he meets, Andrea. Andrea's best friend Grace is the everlasting sixties girl - who remains true to the confrontative counter-culture ideals and we see the other main characters lives develop as they get good jobs, buy large houses in London, have children that go to private schools and as they give in to all the conventions that recent history let them have. The book is excellent because the author carries her cast of characters well, and does what Virginia Woolf admired so much in George Eliot, and perhaps in Katherine Mansfield, she opens doors on her invented characters that allow us to arrange our own thoughts about what parallels we see in our own lives, at the same time enjoying what she, the author Linda Grant, has written. The book is as the Guardian reviewer says a great novel about the lives of the Baby Boomer generation, but it is also a novel that manages to hang together on all fronts. Beginning, middle, end and some sort of resolution of our uneasy spirits in these times - when internet, and the turmoil of the world, and the inevitable aging we have to go through - and we could do with some illustration of this in novel form with a proper beginning, middle and ending, and Linda Grant has managed it here. The novel ends with a bird perched on the mink hat of our main character. This is a successful and satisfying novel. I enjoyed my crying fit in the last six chapters.