Her fiction draws heavily on her Jewish background, family history, and the history of Liverpool. In an interview by Emma Parker for the University of Leicester's July 2008 'Unsettling Women: Contemporary Women's Writing and Diaspora' conference, and later published in the journal "Wasafiri", Grant said: "I always wanted to make my living as a writer, but you couldn’t get a job as an author, so I got a job as a reporter on a local paper just before my eighteenth birthday. I always knew that sooner or later I would write fiction, although I didn’t realise it would be as late as it was. I didn’t write a novel until after the age of forty because it took me a long time to find a fictional voice, which was to do with being Jewish. […] I had been trying different voices and found none adequate. I felt that there were two modes open to me. One was to have a voice like Howard Jacobson, which is absolutely embedded within a recognisable Jewish community, but I was from a community which was not recognised as Jewish. People say, ‘Oh, I never knew that there were any Jews in Liverpool’. Also, growing up in a middle-class family made me marginal to the Liverpool voice, which had always been working-class or Irish. And then there was the generalised middle-class English voice, which always felt to me like ventriloquism. And I didn’t feel that I could write like an American Jewish author such as Philip Roth, who shows how Jewish Americans, like Irish Americans and Italian Americans, have contributed to American national identity, because by the time the Jews arrived here, British national identity had already been formed. And that’s why my first novel, "The Cast Iron Shore", is about somebody who feels marginal. It was only when I started writing about people who are marginal, who have problematic identities and problems with belonging, that I found my voice."