In the spring of 1946, Evelyn Sert stands on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. For the twenty-year-old from London, it is a time of adventure and changes when all things seem possible."Full of sharp humor, complex ironies and an acute eye for cultural clashes, this is a superb coming-of-age novel."-Independent on Sunday (UK)Swept up in the spirited, chaotic churning of her new, strange country, she joins a kibbutz, then moves on to the teeming metropolis of Tel Aviv, to find her own home and a group of friends as eccentric and disparate as the city itself. She falls in love with a man who is not what he seems when she becomes an unwitting spy for a nation fighting to be born."With this, her fourth book, Linda Grant becomes a serious player, cutting and styling her material with journalistic flair and immediacy but none of journalism’s quick fixes… This is a meaty, witty novel, built up of talk and argument as much as action, about identity, alienation, and how to accommodate the past while creating a future. A strength of the novel is that although it is wholly about being Jewish, the concerns can be read as universal."-Victoria Glendinning, Literary ReviewWhen I Lived In Modern Timesis "an unsentimental coming-of-age story of both a country and a young immigrant . . . that provides an unforgettable glimpse of a time and place rarely observed" (Publishers Weekly).Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction