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Welcome to the website of
Charlotte Mendelson, author of When We Were Bad, Daughters of
Jerusalem & Love in Idleness
A Good Read: Radio 4, July
2010
 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 2008
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 |
