Synopses & Reviews
Lorna Sage's adventure in autobiography is a searing and funny anatomy of three marriages that brings to life her girlhood in postwar provincial Britain. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a drinker, a womanizer, a vicar, exiled to a remote village on the Welsh borders. His wife loathed him, lived on memories, and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous Union.
Then her father returns from the army and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built house. Living with her parents, she quickly learns that the world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family -- her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and the mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry of have children, but before long she finds herself having grown up far too fast.
From the memories of her family and of the wounds they inflicted on one another, she tells an extraordinary tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.
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“Deserves special notice… The intensely personal story will resonate with more than just Anglophiles.” Booklist
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“In Bad Blood, [Sage] has written a classic.” New York Review of Books
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“Deeply affecting and beautifully written.” People
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“An award-winning memoir of courageous escape.” Harper's Bazaar
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“Extraordinary… Should stand out for its combination of powerful writing, wicked black humor and social history.” Publishers Weekly Daily
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“Magnificent. . . . A superb memoir of a daughter of the 1950s who got knocked up, but not knocked down.” Maureen Corrigan, National Public Radio's Fresh Air
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“Deserves to become a classic.” The Independent (London)
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“Shockingly frank, but also witty, passionate, and utterly lacking self-pity and surprisingly uplifting.” Kirkus Reviews
Synopsis
Blood trickles down through every generation, seeps into every marriage. An international bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Biography Award,
Bad Blood is a tragicomic memoir of one woman's escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-World War II Britain and the story of three generations of the author's family and its marriages.
In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Bad Blood brings alive in vivid detail a time -- the '40s and '50s -- not so distant from us but now disappeared. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.
Synopsis
Bestselling author Lorna Sage delivers the tragicomic memoirof her escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-WWII Britain—and thestory of the weddings and relationships that defined three generations of herfamily—in Bad Blood, an internationalbestseller and the winner of the coveted Whitbread Biography Award. Readers ofbooks like Angelas Ashes and The Liars Club as well as fans ofSages own lucid and penetrating writing will be captivated by the book thatthe New York Times Book Review said“fills us with wonder and gratitude. . . . Few literary critics have everwritten anything so memorable.”
About the Author
An influential literary critic, Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Her other books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Womens Writing in English, and a study of the novelist Angela Carter. She died in 2001.