Bad blood - Lorna Sage

A literary memoir of the highest calibre by the highly-regarded writer Lorna Sage, which 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 is shocked by Lorna's pregnancy at 16, an event which her grandmother blamed on `the fiendish invention of sex'.

Often extremely funny,and always intelligent, this unique memoir was instantly hailed as a classic upon its first publication.