Bad Blood [Abridged, Audiobook] [Audio Cassette]

Lorna Sage (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 19, 2001

From a childhood of gothic proportions in a vicarage on the Welsh borders, through her adolescence, leaving herself teetering on the brink of the 1960s, Lorna Sage 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 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".

Editorial Reviews

Review

'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.' Clive James 'Speak, Memory! Lorna Sage's memoir is magnificent and quite impossible to lay aside. What a book for this country now. She makes Hanmer, Whitchurch, the shop, the ailing haulage business, the lightless houses, the mad relations, into the real ancestral England, from which the English have ever since been on the run.' Jonathan Raban 'A wonderful book. Bad Blood is a personal history written with such insight it makes of it a social document of true worth. 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 '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 who overcame such difficulties, it is as enjoyable a book as I remember reading.' Doris Lessing

About the Author

Lorna Sage has taught English literature at the University of East Anglia for many years. She is the author of Women in the House of Fiction, a short biography of Angela Carter, and the forthcoming Cambridge Guide To Women's Writing in English. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Audio Cassette
• Publisher: Harper Collins Audio; Abridged edition (February 19, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0007120206
• ISBN-13: 978-0007120208
• Product Dimensions: 5.3 x 4.2 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,799,990 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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