Read about the homes that inspired The Dark Circle
Linda Grant’s latest novel, The Dark Circle is out now. In an exclusive piece on the Virago website, Linda describes the atmostpheric London flats that led her to a cast of characters living in a tuberculosis sanatorium in post-war Britain . . .
The road I live on runs down to the main railway line from the north to King’s Cross. The road was built up at the turn of the last century to provide handsome double-fronted brick houses with stained-glass panels in the front doors for better-off city workers. Their first shot at glory was short-lived; in the twenties the houses declined into run-down lodging houses and bedsits but from the eighties they began to be restored by young middle-class couples looking for cheap family homes. Interspersed at odd intervals along my road are unexpected later developments, small post-war blocks of flats taking up the site of two or three former houses and it’s into one of these that that I moved three years ago.
