Still Here is an extremely busy book. One of the attractions as well as one of the flaws of Linda Grant the novelist rather than Linda Grant the feature-writer is that she can leave nothing unresearched, nothing unexplained. As a fount of detailed geographical and architectural knowledge about Liverpool and Judaism past and present, the bombing of Dresden, soldiering Israeli style, modern middle age, cleansing cream and make-up, Still Here matches many encyclopaedias. As the story of Alix Rebick, a 49-year-old, feisty Jewess, and Joseph Shields, a Jewish-American architect emotionally stunted by his experiences of battle, however, the painstaking reconstruction of the many layers of history that have shaped them is sometimes a little heavy. Of course their history is part of the narrative - an important part - but when you get to the end of the book, in some respects you feel as if the whole thing was a giant prologue and the real story has yet to begin. The truly brave next step would be to write a sequel.

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