‘A completely brilliant book. Breathtakingly good’ — Barbara Trapido 

‘Written with tremendous authority, insight, humour and even wisdom…convincing and moving…funny, absorbing and certain to linger in the imagination’ Spectator

‘Immensely funny and affecting...a novel that wittily and searingly explores the relationships between parents and their adult children… an elegant comedy of longing and survival’ LA Times

‘Wonderful: witty, poignant, surprising and beautifully written. I sprinted through its pages and was sorry to close the covers….brilliant’ Toronto Globe and Mail 

‘Brilliant' Sarah Wienman, Philadelphia Inquirer

‘Our pick of the Orange bunch’  Guardian 

'Compulsive…as full of laughs as it is of tears...[a] stunning tapestry. We can only hope that the Mendelson mantelpiece has room for some more silverware’ Melissa Katsoulis, The Tablet

‘Enthralling… has an admirable stylistic restlessness.  She can take risks and get away with it... Engrossing…emotional depth and stylistic boldness’ Olivia Cole, Literary Review

‘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 

‘I loved this, I really loved this...a sharp, kind, funny, old-fashioned family story...really, really wonderful’ The Weekender BBC Radio 2

‘Unique and utterly recognisable...extraordinary eye for human behaviour...an irresistible treat’ Guardian

‘Intelligent and enjoyable…excellent’ Sunday Times

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad is a perfervid romantic comedy, elegantly written and wonderfully readable’ Helen Simpson

‘The wickedly funny and astutely observed story of a Jewish family in thrall to a fabulous but flawed matriarch’ Sunday Express ‘

‘A clever and touching account…Mendelson’s infectious combination of comedy, gastronomy and wit results in a tale that is both humorous and humane’ Good Book Guide

‘This book explores family life with amazing warmth and wit.  It sweeps you up and holds you tight until the very last page’ Eve

‘Brilliant…highly entertaining’ Independent

‘Funny and emotionally true, this is a comedy with the warmest of hearts and the most deliciously subversive of agendas’  Book of the Month, Marie Claire

‘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

‘Quite superlative’ Scotsman

‘Entertaining, intelligent…difficult to put down…A funny, humane novel about a "perfect" family on the rocks…[Mendelson] is a wonderful writer, economical, inventive, and, when appropriate, lyrical’ Boston Globe

‘Britain is buzzing with a generation of charismatic young faces who are reshaping the nation. Here, Bazaar celebrates the New Establishment - the 40 people under 40 who we feel best represent what it means to be British today...Read on to discover the household names and empire builders of the future…

Charlotte Mendelson: a lasting literary talent. 
Bazaar Says: 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. 
Writer Fay Weldon Says: “I didn’t get to bed until three last night after reading When We Were Bad in the bath. The guilt, the shame, the triumphs, the love and anxieties of family life - Mendelson unpeels the layers like an onion. And she’s so funny; so cross and yet so kind. And so much happens. A novel to devour"' Harper’s Bazaar

‘With great delicacy and elliptical prose, Mendelson draws a subtle and compassionate picture of a family as it unravels.  A novel about secrets and the damage they cause… impressive’ Tina Jackson, Metro

‘Compelling…a poignant and compassionate novel of a family in crisis’ Woman and Home

‘Absolutely spellbinding, so funny, so moving, so totally believable’
Jacqueline Wilson 

‘This is a superbly adroit and darkly funny journey from one of Waterstone's 25 Authors for the Future, centred around lovable family and peopled with a delightful cast who will exasperate, amuse, anger and thoroughly entertain you.’ Waterstone's Books Quarterly

‘Mendelson’s immensely funny and affecting third novel pivots on its bravura opening sequence and then sustains its narrative energy’ Baltimore Sun

‘Mendelson relishes her task, veering thrillingly close to pathos, farce and melodramatic emotion, deploying a style that reads like high gossip at times, but always maintaining poise by lancing the text with barbs of wit… such grace and immaculate lightness’  Tom Adair, Scotland on Sunday

‘Engrossing, clever and frequently funny portrayal of Britain’s Jewish intellectual elite. It is about matriarchy, leaving home, growing up (or maybe not), finding purpose and meaning. Like Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, another fine British novel about family, When We Were Bad is also largely about dysfunction - and resolution.  Its cheeky, witty author, Charlotte Mendelson, is a master of the brittle and the sharp, but she’s also unexpectedly tender, deepening When We Were Bad with warmth at its graceful conclusion. A biting, dramatic comedy of manners’ St Petersburg Times (Florida)

‘Charlotte Mendelson is one of our most exciting young novelists… She has no peer for dramatizing the tangled web of family relationships and loyalties, for exploring the perils of intellectualism and self-satisfaction.  Her fiction excels at showing the curious ways by which sexual passion can take us by surprise… Mendelson has a gift for showing characters conflicted between their wish to show loyalty to their families, and their desire to follow their own sexual path… Frances is a typical Mendelson heroine:  sensitive, bookish, rather clumsy, and passionate.  The book traces how she is bowled over, undone and finally liberated by her own integrity… When We Were Bad is a tale of twists, in which the careful excellence of Mendelson’s plotting keeps the reader turning the pages, gripped by the characters’ muddled attempts to live their lives without hurting each other… The novel that came to my mind was Jonathan Franzen’s smash hit, The Corrections.  Like Franzen, Mendelson dissects the most complex family issues, and can show through a few words the painful tensions and histories that can lie under the most innocuous words.  They share a skill for set pieces and a tender eye for detail… Mendelson and Franzen have a talent for short, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a skill at showing the workings of the human mind… When We Were Bad is a bold, brilliant, beautiful novel and a touching, poignant and often hilarious rollercoaster ride through sex, secrets and family love.  A shoo-in for the Orange or Booker prize, surely’ The Book Magazine

‘So while I’m still bruised that this year’s judges have ignored three books I love (Adam Thorpe’s Between Each Breath, John Preston’s The Dig, Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad), I’m prepared to believe that these six novels are very good’ Rachel Cooke, Observer on the Booker shortlist

‘Never has the perfect family cracked and crumbled with such elegance,
warmth and humour.  I read all day and night, neglecting my own family
shamelessly’ Meg Rosoff

‘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)

‘Philip Roth has said that his fiction is about people in trouble, and trouble is what Mendelson proves so good at making for her characters. Like Roth in … Portnoy’s Complaint, Mendelson succeeds in creating a family environment that is both appealing and appalling. When We Were Bad is a funny, smart and delightfully ambivalent novel about surviving the people who love us most’ Montreal Gazette

‘Secret thoughts and unnameable hangups are teased out in glowing, metaphorical and often very funny prose…Mendelson explores the shadows and ghosts haunting a family which appears to outsiders to be a harmonious, messy, intellectual ideal’ Times Literary Supplement

‘“The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness.” In this wicked tale, Mendelson gives us family unhappiness not as tragedy but as farce.  Mendelson has been selected by Waterstone’s as one of the “25 authors for the future” and When We Were Bad—a British-Jewish-family comedy of manners—displays her sharp wit and sure grasp of human foibles, the conflicting demands of family loyalty and independence, the conjoining of love and revenge’ Publishers Weekly

‘Fast-paced and engaging’ Nextbook.org

‘Deliciously disastrous story... beautifully realized, real and intimate and heartbreaking… hilarious…[This] clever social satire builds to an ending that is more elegant than redemptive. And this, after all, is what we want: to be able to forgive just enough to move past them, but not enough to forget them’ Yael Goldstein, Ha’aretz

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s portrait of a Jewish family in crisis is 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

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad was one of 2007’s most Jewish books, as well as being one of its most popular (certainly in North London).  Now this intense and funny tale of a priceless family ruled by a glamorous female rabbi is back’ Jewish Chronicle

‘The Rubin family seems "doomed to happiness", but, in Mendelson's wryly humorous novel, dissatisfaction simmers beneath the surface of perfection... We envy, despise, and ultimately care deeply for this extravagantly dysfunctional family’  Sunday Times

Woman & Home Pick of the Paperbacks: ‘A compassionate and poignant novel of a family in crisis.’