{"product_id":"bad-blood-a-memoir-isbn-9780066214436","title":"Bad Blood: A Memoir","description":"Bestselling author Lorna Sage delivers the tragicomic memoirof her escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post-WWII Britain—and thestory of the weddings and relationships that defined three generations of herfamily—in \u003cem\u003eBad Blood\u003c\/em\u003e, an internationalbestseller and the winner of the coveted Whitbread Biography Award. Readers ofbooks like \u003cem\u003eAngela’s Ashes \u003c\/em\u003eand \u003cem\u003eThe Liar’s Club \u003c\/em\u003eas well as fans ofSage’s own lucid and penetrating writing will be captivated by the book thatthe \u003cem\u003eNew York Times Book Review \u003c\/em\u003esaid“fills us with wonder and gratitude. . . . Few literary critics have everwritten anything so memorable.” | \u003cp align=\"left\"\u003eLorna Sage's adventure in autobiography is a searing and funny anatomy of three marriages that brings to life her girlhood in postwar provincial Britain. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a drinker, a womanizer, a vicar, exiled to a remote village on the Welsh borders. His wife loathed him, lived on memories, and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous Union.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp align=\"left\"\u003eThen her father returns from the army and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built house. Living with her parents, she quickly learns that the world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family -- her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and the mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry of have children, but before long she finds herself having grown up far too fast.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp align=\"left\"\u003eFrom the memories of her family and of the wounds they inflicted on one another, she tells an extraordinary tale of thwarted love, failed religion, and the salvation she found in books. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.\u003c\/p\u003e | \u003cp\u003e“A postwar memoir of uncommon amplitude and power.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A scintillating memoir of three generations.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLos Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Brilliant tragicomic memoir. . . . Searing social history. . . . Imagine Dickensian detail with Penelope Fitzgerald’s mastery of ironic tragedy, all managed with a wickedly light touch.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Newsday\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Magnificent. . . . A superb memoir of a daughter of the 1950s who got knocked up, but not knocked down.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eMaureen Corrigan, National Public Radio's Fresh Air\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Highly satisfying. . . . A compelling tale. . . . Her writing is so alive with color and tone that at times you’ll forget you’re readinga memoir and not a novel.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eChicago Tribune\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“In Bad Blood, [Sage] has written a classic.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Review of Books\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“The family intimacy of the voice and Sage’s calm affection for people she sees through so clearly give her prose an enduring eloquence.  From harsh turf a life rises that fills us with wonder and gratitude.  Few literary critics have ever written anything so memorable.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eEditor's Choice, Best Books of 2002, New York Times Book Review\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can’t help but be entertained, wickedly… Perfect book club reading comining social history and great writing - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly (Starred Review)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A haunting tale of growing up in postwar Wales.  This remarkably brave, bleak book should speak to a whole generation of Western women and men who came of age during that time. . . . Wildly funny. . . . This memoir stands up to the very best.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eLibrary Journal (Starred Reveiw)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Shockingly frank, but also witty, passionate, and utterly lacking self-pity — and surprisingly uplifting.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eKirkus Reviews\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Deserves special notice… The intensely personal story will resonate with more than just Anglophiles.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eBooklist\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Lorna Sage’s Whitbread Award winning memoir is smart, sad and brutally funny.  She commented that sometimes she felt as though she grew up in ‘an enclave of the 19th century.’  Indeed, this book reads like something the Bronte sisters might have written had they managed to get out more.  The central figures in Ms. Sage’s childhood are alarmingly dysfunctional but her intelligence and wonderfully skewed point of view allowed her to create a fascinating world where little Lorna seems terribly wise and often terribly young.  By all means step into the Welsh country–side with her and grit your teeth and laugh and cry and get to know this amazing girl.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eDonna Price, Hawley–Cooke Booksellers, Louisville, KY\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Deeply affecting and beautifully written.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePeople\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A wonderful book. . . . Read \u003ci\u003eBad Blood\u003c\/i\u003e. . . before all the book clubs in the country start talking about it.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eWashington Post Book World\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“[A] wry family memoir. . . . Vigorously recounted. . .[with] humor and lack of self–pity. . . . At once literary and scientifically exacting, Sage’s investigations bring an entire era alarmingly to life.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Extraordinary… Should stand out for its combination of powerful writing, wicked black humor and social history.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003ePublishers Weekly Daily\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A postwar memoir of uncommon amplitude and power … Sage draws a sad–funny–gruesome portrait of her upbringing that mixes the poignancy of Dickens with the sardonic realism of Beryl Bainbridge.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eNew York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“For its lacerating intelligence, its unforced intimacy, its passionate vigor of recall, Bad Blood is the very best modern memoir I have ever read.  It is  a heartbreakingly good book — and a very funny one.  Though you’ll have to search a good map to find Hanmer, the Flintshire village where Lorna Sage grew up, you know the place already.  It might be Oregon, or Iowa, or New Jersey.  It might be anywhere.  For Hanmer is that province of the spirit — narrow of mind, complacent in its certainties, defensive, sad — where we all came from, or fear we’re headed for.  But no one has ever described it like this, with such witty and rueful understanding, or turned the story of her own escape into a narrative that has the universal ring of myth.  When people in the far future want to know how it was to be a girl in the twentieth century, they will read Bad Blood.“ - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJonathan Raban\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Lorna Sage has always been among the most acute literary critics of her generation, and this book shows why: because she writes so well herself, with an honesty equal to a story as painful as this.  She has transmuted a bad dream into a book of classic poise.  This is not a book for children, but neither was her childhood.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eClive James\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“A triumph of narrative, of acutely remembered detail and more surprisingly, of comic drama and exhilarating resilience.  When I finished reading it, I wanted to begin all over again, partly to see how she had done it, partly out of the compulsion of sheer enjoyment.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAnthony Twaite\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Sage rejects empty romanticizing in favor of complex truth. . . . Her observations probe deeply. . . . This memoir captures both a type—a book–loving girl of the 1950s, with the disadvantages of her gender and rural upbringing, who will make a brilliant career for herself—and an intensely strange, scrappy, and winning individual.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eAtlantic Monthly (editor's choice)\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“An award-winning memoir of courageous escape.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eHarper's Bazaar\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003e“Lorna Sage’s memoir of her girlhood in post–war Britain, and especially of her grandparents’ poisonous relationship, is honest and forthright.  Yet, a sweetness comes through, and there is a marked lack of bitterness.  This is a book that will not only satisfy, but will stay with the reader long afterwards.” - \u003cb\u003e\u003ci\u003eJune Applen, The Book Mark, Atlantic Beach, FL\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"William Morrow","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":44889292472549,"sku":"NP9780066214436","price":24.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780066214436.jpg?v=1730230944","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/bad-blood-a-memoir-isbn-9780066214436","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}