Winner of the Orange Prize for Fiction 2000.
Evelyn Sert is standing on the deck of a ship bound for Palestine. It's April 1946 and armies of men and women are on the move across Europe, intent on coming home - if they have homes left to go to. A young hairdresser from Soho, Evelyn is soon to arrive in the glittering white Bauhaus city of Tel Aviv, where Jewish refugees and idealists from all over Europe are gathering to forge not only the new Jew but a modern consciousness on the edge of the Middle East.
As the old imperial British identity collapses in slow motion around her, the cafes are teeming with intellectuals, politicans, artists, Zionist gunmen and gangsters, intent on plotting the future and devouring pastries in a city where a babble of cultures and languages are meeting each other again for the first time in 2000 years.
For Evelyn, adept at disguises, it is a time when anything seems possible - the new self, new Jew, new woman are all feasible. Together with her lover Johnny, she is drawn into the heart of the struggle. Both an erotically charged love story and an elegy for a lost time, 'When I Lived in Modern Times' is a novel of passions and ideas.
