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    Bad Blood: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    Bad Blood: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Unavailable
    Bad Blood: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Ebook299 pages5 hours

    Bad Blood: A Memoir (Text Only)

    By Lorna Sage

    3.5/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    About this ebook

    From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960's, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.

    Lorna Sage’s memoir of childhood and adolescence is a brilliantly written bravura piece of work, which vividly and wickedly brings to life her eccentric family and somewhat bizarre upbringing in the small town of Hanmer, on the border between Wales and Shropshire.

    The period as well as the place is evoked with crystal clarity: 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 the community was shocked by Lorna’s pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on ‘the fiendish invention of sex’.

    Bad Blood is often extremely funny, and is at the same time a deeply intelligent insight by a unique literary stylist into the effect on three generations of women of their environment and their relationships.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins UK
    Release dateJul 25, 2013
    ISBN9780007374281
    Unavailable
    Bad Blood: A Memoir (Text Only)
    Author

    Lorna Sage

    Lorna Sage’s books include ‘Women in the House of Fiction’ (1992), ‘The Cambridge Guide to Women’s Writing in English’ (1999), a short monograph on Angela Carter, and ‘Bad Blood’, which won the 2000 Whitbread Biography Award and became a number one bestseller. She died in January 2001.

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    Reviews for Bad Blood

    3.5/5

    4 ratings4 reviews

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    • 3/5
      Some of the print reviews call this memoir tenderly written, an exuberant celebration, generous. I'm going to say no to all of that. For the most part the author is a sullen observer of miserable people. One reviewer said it described a time in English villages that England continues to run from - that comes closest to my perception. However there are some pertinent observations on women and their lives and the fact that intelligence, education, self determination and books can pull them out of drudgery and self destruction.
    • 4/5
      Really enjoyed this, at time it kind of reminded me of Cider With Rosie.Liked the inclusion of the photographs (one a of Lorna and her brother reminded me of one of me and my brother).Would have liked it to go on to talk more about her life at university and how they lived there.Really didn't expect it to become a teen pregnancy story.
    • 4/5
      Terrific memoir about growing up in the fifties and sixties. The story of the vicarage childhood and school days of a bookish girl who didn't fit in. Moving and ultimately uplifting.
    • 2/5
      I generally love memoirs, but I had trouble getting too involved in this one. The author, Lorna Sage, grows up in a "bad" family in Britain and becomes a teenage mother. I didn't find Sage's story particularly interesting, particularly sad, or particularly funny.