4th Estate Matchbook Classics - Bad Blood (4th Estate Matchbook Classics)
One of the most critically acclaimed memoirs ever written.
One of the ten books – novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography – that make up our Matchbook Classics’ series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.
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.
‘Bad Blood is pretty much 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 -
'[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 -
'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 -
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