293 pages
English language
Published July 9, 2008 by Scribner.
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 Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival both banal and heroic and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.
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 Sandor so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? This is a novel about survival both banal and heroic and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desire to live.
Subjects
- Jewish women -- Fiction
- Hungarians -- England -- Fiction
- Uncles -- Fiction
- Nieces -- Fiction
- London (England) -- Fiction