The Dark Circle

Shortlisted for the Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction, this novel is described as "extraordinarily affecting" by Alex Preston of the Observer. It is a story whose engine is flesh and blood, not cold ideas. Grant brings the 1950s—an odd, downbeat, fertile decade between war and sexual liberation—into sharp, bright, heartbreaking focus, according to Christobel Kent of the Guardian.

All over Britain, life is beginning again now that the war is over, but for Lenny and Miriam, East End London teenage twins who have been living on the edge of the law, life is suspended—they've contracted tuberculosis. They are sent to a newly opened NHS sanatorium in deepest Kent, where they will encounter a very different world. Among the other patients are an aristocrat, a young university graduate, a mysterious German woman, and an American merchant seaman with big ideas about love and rebellion. They are not the only ones whose lives will be changed.