In The Illusion of Return, his first novel in English, Samir El-Youssef explores the themes of memory and personal and collective tragedy. Comedy seems to be the only way to survive the absurdity of violence and politics. He discussed this and much more with Linda Grant.

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In her then new novel, Linda Grant wrote about a sensitive girl growing up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents. The dramatic arrival of a glamorous uncle, violently unwelcome by her parents, changes everything. A story of concealed pasts, stark choices and how the clothes we wear define us all. A novel about survival – both banal and heroic – and a young woman who discovers the complications, even betrayals, that inevitably accompany the fierce desir...

Clothes matter. How we choose to dress ourselves defines our identity. The former editor of Cosmopolitan spoke to Linda Grant, who has shown us that clothes can be a serious intellectual topic, and to Catherine Hill, who has proved that elegance and femininity can be life and death issues.

The film, Jellyfish, captures the hidden narratives of everyday Tel-Aviv life and draws a vision of the hundred-year old city which is both more seedy and magical than often meets the eye. To mark the publication of the film’s screenplay, Shira Geffen, writer and co-director (along with Etgar Keret) spoke to Linda Grant about the film and untold stories which fill the city.

Linda Grant spoke to Joan Bakewell about her new novel, We Had It So Good, which takes us from the late 60s to today, following the lives of a group of friends from youthful idealism to middle-class successes, until the events of late middle-age and the new century force them to realise that their fortunate generation has always lived in a fool’s paradise.

JBW 2012 celebrated the 60th Anniversary of Jewish Book Week. When the first Jewish Book Week took place, memories of the War were painfully fresh and Israel a fragile idealistic fledgling state; It was the year Queen Elizabeth came to the throne and The Diary of Anne Frank was published in English. The world has changed in more ways than we could have foreseen: religion is openly criticised, we live in a multicultural society, Israel has still not achieved peace with its neighbours an...

2015 marks the 125th anniversary of the birth of GB Stern, the little-known, but influential author of The Matriarch. The book, originally published in 1924, was the first of a series of novels to explore the scandalous life of a west London Jewish family at the dawn of the 20th century. Linda Grant, who has called it “a feminist classic”, discusses the novel’s lasting significance with Rabbi Julia...

Linda Grant and AD Miller, together with Charlotte Mendelson, discuss the creative process – how they arrive at their ideas and characters or, perhaps, how ideas and characters come to them. Both Linda Grant’s The Clothes on their Backs and AD Miller’s Snowdrops were shortlisted for the Man Booker prize; their new novels, Linda’s Upstairs at the Party and Andrew’s The Faithful Couple, e...

Linda’s Grant’s sparkling new novel, The Dark Circle, is set in 1950, two years into the NHS, revolving around a TB sanatorium in the Kent countryside, where the East End Lynsky twins are the only Jews. It has been described as ‘drenched in colour and light’; and is at once very funny and heart-breaking, offering a penetrating vision of the swiftly changing landscape of the post-war era. Sarah Moss’s courageous and unflinching novel of contemporary life, The Tidal Zon...