Description
From a childhood of gothic proportions, through teenage pregnancy in the 1960s, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women in one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs of all time.
Lorna Sage's outstanding memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and bizarre upbringing in rural Wales.
The period is evoked through a wickedly funny and deeply intelligent account: from the 1940s, dominated for Lorna by her dissolute but charismatic vicar grandfather; through the 1950s, where the invention of fish fingers revolutionised the lives of housewives like Lorna's mother; to the brink of the 1960s, where Lorna's pregnancy at 16 outraged those around her, an event her grandmother blamed on the fiendish invention of sex.
Bad Blood vividly and wittily explores a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.
As seen on BBC Between the Covers
About the Author
Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia. Her previous books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a short monograph on Angela Carter. Lorna Sage died in Januray 2001
Reviews
'In a class of its own ... It is a measure of her achievement that she can turn the peculiarities of her own past - and they are peculiar - into a narrative that speaks for the whole of post-war Britian ... This is not just an exquisite personal memoir, it is a vital piece of our collective past.' Daily Telegraph
'A wonderful book. Women need this kind of book but perhaps men need it more, to give the sort of understanding which we still lack of how girls actually grow up.' Margaret Forster
'This could have been the saddest book you have ever read, but because of Lorna Sage's relish in the details, her exuberant celebration of the vitality of this clever, surviving girl, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.'
Doris Lessing
'[a] rich, justly acclaimed autobiography ... this almost perfect memoir is a tribute to imperfection' Independent
'An almost unbearably eloquent memoir ... Bad Blood is also a tale of shared consciousness, and although the lives Sage describes clash with and limit her own, there is much that is redemptive here, and even elegiac' Frances Wilson, Guardian
Awards
Winner of J.R. Ackerley Prize 2001 and Whitbread Book Awards: Biography Category 2000 and Whitbread Prize (Biography) 2000. Short-listed for Whitbread Book Awards: Book of the Year 2000.
Book Information
ISBN 9781841150437
Author Lorna Sage
Format Paperback
Page Count 288
Imprint Fourth Estate Ltd
Publisher HarperCollins Publishers
Weight(grams) 220g
Dimensions(mm) 198mm * 129mm * 19mm
