Bad Blood

Whitbread Award Winner: A memoirist “conjures up her claustrophobic childhood in the small Welsh village of Hanmer with wit and unsentimental clarity” (The New York Times). 

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, Lorna Sage’s prose brings to life 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.

“Her father was off fighting in World War II, her mother off in her own dreamy rerun of adolescence, so young Lorna hung onto the ‘skirts’ of her vicar grandpa, a histrionic, bitterly intelligent philanderer . . . Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can’t help but be entertained., wickedly . . . perfect book club reading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“She lifts your spirits even as she hurts your heart.” —Daily Telegraph

“Deeply affecting and beautifully written.” —People

“Evocative, enthralling, often hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times

“A superb memoir of a daughter of the ’50s who got knocked up, but not knocked down.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air