June 2011: The Essay: InterRail Postcards, Radio
3
It is almost forty years since the introduction of the first Inter-rail Pass - restricted to travellers of 26 or younger and covering 21 countries for a month's train travel.
Charlotte Mendelson explores travelling by Interrail in the early 1990s - just into the era of the new Europe. At a personal level, she recalls how travel in Europe transformed a timid young, Oxford school girl forever. Click here to listen
October 2010: Woman's Hour, Radio
4
Jenni Murray interviews Charlotte about When
We Were Bad and matriarchs; to listen again, click here
July 2010: A Good Read, Radio
4
 Sue
Macgregor talks about When We Were Bad
with Helen Fraser, the Chief Executive of the Girls' Day School Trust,
and writer and comic performer Neil Innes on A Good Read, broadcast on
July 6 2010. To
listen to an excerpt from A Good Read, click here
The Orange Prize for
Fiction
When We Were Bad was shorlisted for the
Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008. Find out more here
Recent Reviews:
'Charlotte Mendelson is one of the
most accomplished novelists in the UK today. She writes about the
pleasures and the perils of love, desire and family life with
devastating precision and wit'
Sarah Waters ( More… )
'When We Were Bad' combines writing to linger over, a plot to race
through and characters to care about...investigates their individual
crises and epiphanies with cleverness and charm'
Guardian
'Charlotte Mendelson's When We Were Bad is a
perferct romantic comedy, elegantly written and wonderfully readable,
in which the likeable Rubins siblings struggle for emotional freedom
from their family's powerful embrace'
Helen Simpson, New Statesman
A Room of One's Own
Charlotte writing about the
'startlingly ugly' room in which she writes in the Guardian - click here
Summer Taste:
Charlotte described a profoundly
unromantic teenage trip to Florence as part of the Summer Taste series on BBC Radio 4.
Blogging:
A video blog about where When We
Were Bad is set, filmed for the Guardian: click here
And here are two blogs Charlotte
wrote about it, for the Picador website and the Guardian
A selection of paperback reviews:
'Wryly humorous…we envy, despise
and ultimately care deeply for this extravagantly dysfunctional family’
Best Summer Reads, Sunday Times
'Both extremely funny and acutely
painful...Mendelson, whose writing glitters with stylistic panache and
moral force, masterfully evokes the complex web of emotions that yokes
her well-realised characters together'
Sunday Telegraph
'The Rubins, and their assorted
foibles, flaws and neuroses, are at once unique and utterly
recognisable...her extraordinary eye for human behaviour will endear
readers to each and every Rubin...Combining frankness with a sharp and
intelligent humour, When We Were Bad
is an irresistible treat'
Guardian
'Wickedly funny and
poignant...beautifully observed and painfully authentic. It confirms
Mendelson, author of the dazzling Daughters
of Jerusalem, as one of our most versatile and original young
authors'
Daily Mail
'Charlotte Mendelson attracted much
praise for her wickedly sharp second novel, Daughters
of Jerusalem, but compared with this it seems almost demure. When We Were Bad is relentlessly good:
crammed with brilliant, skewering details...it is a mark of
[Mendelson's] skill that these never impede the plot; as the wheels
fall off the Rubin wagon, she maintains both pace and intrigue
admirably'
Observer
For more reviews of When We Were Bad, please click
here
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