‘This exuberantly brilliant novel by one of Britain’s most exciting writers...British Jewry has finally gotten its own sprawling Jewish family novel. More delightfully, like the best fiction, it is universal’
—FORWARD (US)

‘Wonderful: witty, poignant, surprising and beautifully written. I sprinted through its pages and was sorry to close the covers….brilliant… Mendelson takes a number of risks to brilliant effect. Her tale unfolds in present tense, lending urgency to her characters’ fates and heightening narrative momentum. We experience what happens to the Rubins moment by moment, as they do, without hindsight or analysis. In lesser hands, a perennial present might prove awkward, but here it works. "Jews behaving badly" is how Mendelson encapsulates her novel in the Guardian, and this is progress. I find it refreshing to see a Jewish family portrayed as neither exemplary nor caricaturish. The Rubins are simply themselves’
—TORONTO GLOBE AND MAIL

‘A lasting literary talent. Hailed as a new star of writing well before her first novel was published, Mendelson has risen above the hype to forge a substantial career. Her second book, Daughters of Jerusalem, scooped the Somerset Maugham Award in 2004; and on the publication of When We Were Bad, Waterstone's tipped her as one of the 25 authors for the future...With US publication imminent, we think Mendelson is ready to join Zadie Smith and David Mitchell in Brit's big league’
—HARPER’S BAZAAR

‘A witty and absorbing work of fiction...wonderful...surprising and satisfying’
—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘Immensely funny and affecting...It would be easy to categorize When We Were Bad as "Jewish fiction" (though considerably more difficult to debate what that entails), but Mendelson has produced something much rarer – a novel that wittily and searingly explores the relationships between parents and their adult children...an elegant comedy of longing and survival’
—LA TIMES

‘Quite superlative’
—SCOTSMAN

‘Rarely has the suffocating hold of family life been so powerfully portrayed as it has here...Mendelson’s great achievement is to make us care…uncompromising and brave’
—DAILY MAIL

‘Mendelson has an ear for unexpected vocabulary and occasional outrageous and starting simile, but her real talent is poetic, for barbed language and a sense of metaphor that’s unerring’
—GLASGOW HERALD

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad will take its place among classic accounts of tribal misadventure with the same apparent effortlessness that proves so pleasurable in her writing. Rarely can readers of contemporary fiction feel themselves to be in such safe hands. How her editors must have thrilled when presented with such an impeccable novel. Her characters manifest that consummate novelistic accomplishment: fiction with the air of reportage’
—Hannah Betts, THE TIMES

‘A dazzling portrait of a family in crisis. Watchful, alert to details and insightful, it more than meets the challenge of its opening line: “The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness”’
—Gerard Woodward, GUARDIAN

‘Assured, inventive and entertaining…brilliantly climactic…intelligent and witty. The Rubin family may be a singular one but the delights and the difficulties its members have with sex and spirituality, food and domesticity, expectation and acheivement, will have a universal appeal’
—SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘Intelligent and enjoyable…excellent’
—THE SUNDAY TIMES

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad will take its place among classic accounts of tribal misadventure with the same apparent effortlessness that proves so pleasurable in her writing. Rarely can readers of contemporary fiction feel themselves to be in such safe hands. How her editors must have thrilled when presented with such an impeccable novel. The family in question is the Rubins; a unit not merely Jewish, but rabbinical, and yet instantly recognisable...Her characters manifest that consummate novelistic accomplishment: fiction with the air of reportage. Like one’s own nearest and sometime dearest, the Rubins don’t appear written, they just are’
—Hannah Betts, THE TIMES

‘Unique and utterly recognisable...extraordinary eye for human behaviour...an irresistible treat’
—GUARDIAN (pb review)

‘This is a dazzling portrait of a family in crisis. Watchful, alert to details and insightful, it more than meets the challenge of its opening line: “The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness’
—Gerard Woodward, GUARDIAN

‘This is a third novel by Charlotte Mendelson, whose second, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. Her novels are perfectly balanced observations of human nature captured in all its hideous glories, usually in family settings. As intelligent as it is funny, her writing is brilliant at bringing out the awkwardness of the transition from family life to independent adult existence (if, indeed, any of us really achieve it)… Mendelson's writing is a joy because it is ultra-tight: not one spare word…There is just the right tension between plot and character here: you care about how it will all unravel and you relish every moment along the way. Mendelson has an astonishing eye for detail, for images and sayings that remain with you long afterwards. She gives her characters seemingly innocuous secret thoughts full of meaning…This is a beautifully observed literary comedy as well as a painfully accurate depiction of one big old family mess. It makes you cringe, laugh and wince in all the right places. It is not so much about the life of one Jewish family as it is about the lies we all tell ourselves in order to put up with our ramshackle home lives’
—Viv Groskop, OBSERVER

‘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, for which Mendelson has a magpie's eye. It is a mark of her skill that these never impede the plot’
—Stephanie Cross, OBSERVER

‘The multi award-winning Charlotte Mendelson is famous for whipping up the hottest, messiest, family dramas a writer of literary fiction can...This is late Shakespeare meets Modern Family and it’s irresistible’
— THE TIMES