The new book from the Orange Prize-winning, and Man Booker Prize-shortlisted, novelist Linda Grant is joyously bold. Our narrator Adele opens with: ‘If you go back and look at your life there are certain scenes, acts, or maybe just incidents on which everything that follows seems to depend. If only you could narrate them, then you might be understood. I mean the part of yourself that you don’t know how to explain.’

What follows is Adele’s attempt to express this and so we see her life unfold in a series of chaotic conversations and events: her job at a perfume counter in Liverpool; her admittance to a liberal university based on the pretense of being Allen Ginsberg’s cousin; her lover’s bed on a rocking barge; her obsessive search for old journals that might unlock the secret to Evie/Stevie, a glamorous and androgynous couple. Adele describes her life as myth, a time when the ‘university computer took up a whole building and was tended by math students in white lab coats’, and certainly for those of us who have grown up with the internet, Adele’s pre-internet world does hold mystery and romance.

Though Grant’s prose is uneven – at times jarring and at times heart-stoppingly beautiful – it is undeniably funny. This novel reveals her particular talent for metaphor and simile with descriptions that frequently delighted me in their simultaneous strangeness and familiarity. Adele’s accounts of the political salons, literary salons and consciousness-raising groups she attended at university are mordant and droll, displaying Grant’s distinctly British sense of humour in the best possible way. These posed interactions that typified Adele and her friends’ relationships was what I enjoyed most about Upstairs at the Party – their attempts to answer questions of gender politics and identity, to make sense of their lives and impose their own moral beliefs were dated, yet eerily reminiscent of contemporary life.

Bronte Coates