The Clothes On Their Backs

In a red brick mansion block off the Marylebone Road, a sensitive, bookish girl grows up sealed off from both past and present by her timid refugee parents, surrounded by well-to-do neighbours living mysterious, enthralling lives. Then one morning a glamorous uncle appears, done up in a mohair suit and a diamond watch with a wonderful girl in a leopard-skin pill-box hat on his arm. But why is this man so violently unwelcome in her parents' home? The young Vivien begins to push against the constraints of home and escapes to university. But a shocking event soon sends her back to her parents' home and to her uncle Sandy, only recently released from prison. Volunteering to help him write his life story, she learns about the concealed past and the stark choices faced by those intent on survival. As history reveals itself, so too does the simmering London of the 1970s--all punk and skinheads, all race, class and creed, bovver boots and spiked hair--and Viv comes to understand how the clothes we wear define us.