Bad Blood - by Lorna Sage (Paperback)

About the Book

Originally published: London: Fourth Estate, 2000.

Book 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 Angela's Ashes and The Liar's Club as well as fans ofSage's 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."

From the Back Cover

"The bad blood had missed a generation. You're just like your grandfather, my mother said."

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 a family--its triumphs and its darkest secrets.

With wit and a dose of self-deprecating humor, Sage's prose brings to life in vivid detail a period--the 1940s and 1950s--that continues to influence and shape society in the twenty-first century. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, Bad Blood is unsurpassed.

Review Quotes

"A postwar memoir of uncommon amplitude and power." - New York Times
"A scintillating memoir of three generations." - Los Angeles Times
"Brilliant tragicomic memoir. . . . Searing social history. . . . Imagine Dickensian detail with Penelope Fitzgerald's mastery of ironic tragedy, all managed with a wickedly light touch." - New York Newsday
"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
"Highly satisfying. . . . A compelling tale. . . . Her writing is so alive with color and tone that at times you'll forget you're readinga memoir and not a novel." - Chicago Tribune
"In Bad Blood, [Sage] has written a classic." - New York Review of Books
"The family intimacy of the voice and Sage's calm affection for people she sees through so clearly give her prose an enduring eloquence. From harsh turf a life rises that fills us with wonder and gratitude. Few literary critics have ever written anything so memorable." - Editor's Choice, Best Books of 2002, New York Times Book Review
"Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can't help but be entertained, wickedly... Perfect book club reading comining social history and great writing - Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)
"A haunting tale of growing up in postwar Wales. This remarkably brave, bleak book should speak to a whole generation of Western women and men who came of age during that time. . . . Wildly funny. . . . This memoir stands up to the very best." - Library Journal (Starred Reveiw)
"Shockingly frank, but also witty, passionate, and utterly lacking self-pity -- and surprisingly uplifting." - Kirkus Reviews
"Deserves special notice... The intensely personal story will resonate with more than just Anglophiles." - Booklist
"Lorna Sage's Whitbread Award winning memoir is smart, sad and brutally funny. She commented that sometimes she felt as though she grew up in 'an enclave of the 19th century.' Indeed, this book reads like something the Bronte sisters might have written had they managed to get out more. The central figures in Ms. Sage's childhood are alarmingly dysfunctional but her intelligence and wonderfully skewed point of view allowed her to create a fascinating world where little Lorna seems terribly wise and often terribly young. By all means step into the Welsh country-side with her and grit your teeth and laugh and cry and get to know this amazing girl." - Donna Price, Hawley-Cooke Booksellers, Louisville, KY
"Deeply affecting and beautifully written." - People
"A wonderful book. . . . Read Bad Blood. . . before all the book clubs in the country start talking about it." - Washington Post Book World
"[A] wry family memoir. . . . Vigorously recounted. . .[with] humor and lack of self-pity. . . . At once literary and scientifically exacting, Sage's investigations bring an entire era alarmingly to life." - The New Yorker
"Extraordinary... Should stand out for its combination of powerful writing, wicked black humor and social history." - Publishers Weekly Daily
"A postwar memoir of uncommon amplitude and power ... Sage draws a sad-funny-gruesome portrait of her upbringing that mixes the poignancy of Dickens with the sardonic realism of Beryl Bainbridge." - New York Times
"For its lacerating intelligence, its unforced intimacy, its passionate vigor of recall, Bad Blood is the very best modern memoir I have ever read. It is a heartbreakingly good book -- and a very funny one. Though you'll have to search a good map to find Hanmer, the Flintshire village where Lorna Sage grew up, you know the place already. It might be Oregon, or Iowa, or New Jersey. It might be anywhere. For Hanmer is that province of the spirit -- narrow of mind, complacent in its certainties, defensive, sad -- where we all came from, or fear we're headed for. But no one has ever described it like this, with such witty and rueful understanding, or turned the story of her own escape into a narrative that has the universal ring of myth. When people in the far future want to know how it was to be a girl in the twentieth century, they will read Bad Blood." - Jonathan Raban
"Lorna Sage has always been among the most acute literary critics of her generation, and this book shows why: because she writes so well herself, with an honesty equal to a story as painful as this. She has transmuted a bad dream into a book of classic poise. This is not a book for children, but neither was her childhood." - Clive James
"A triumph of narrative, of acutely remembered detail and more surprisingly, of comic drama and exhilarating resilience. When I finished reading it, I wanted to begin all over again, partly to see how she had done it, partly out of the compulsion of sheer enjoyment." - Anthony Twaite
"Sage rejects empty romanticizing in favor of complex truth. . . . Her observations probe deeply. . . . This memoir captures both a type--a book-loving girl of the 1950s, with the disadvantages of her gender and rural upbringing, who will make a brilliant career for herself--and an intensely strange, scrappy, and winning individual." - Atlantic Monthly (editor's choice)
"An award-winning memoir of courageous escape." - Harper's Bazaar
"Lorna Sage's memoir of her girlhood in post-war Britain, and especially of her grandparents' poisonous relationship, is honest and forthright. Yet, a sweetness comes through, and there is a marked lack of bitterness. This is a book that will not only satisfy, but will stay with the reader long afterwards." - June Applen, The Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, FL