‘Mendelson’s reflections on family and identity are both poignant and effortlessly profound’
—MAIL ON SUNDAY

‘The multi award-winning Charlotte Mendelson is famous for whipping up the hottest, messiest, family dramas a writer of literary fiction can’
—TABLET

‘Mendelson has an ear for unexpected vocabulary and occasional outrageous and starting simile, but her real talent is poetic, for barbed language and a sense of metaphor that’s unerring’
—GLASGOW HERALD

‘One of Britain’s most exciting writers’
—FORWARD (US)

‘A hugely gifted writer’
—SUNDAY TIMES

‘Mendelson confirms herself to be a hugely gifted writer, particularly in her scene-setting which melds wit and sharp-eyed observation, and her extended comic interludes’
–SUNDAY TIMES

‘Mendelson has a rare gift when it comes to bringing her characters alive’ 
—Erica Wagner, THE TIMES

‘The award-winning Charlotte Mendelson is in a class of her own’
—TABLET

‘Mendelson's novels inhabit similar territory to those of Maggie O'Farrell, with the same capacity for extreme noticing, the same profound emotional intelligence shaping the characters and driving the narrative’
—OBSERVER

‘Mendelson’s writing is a joy’
—Viv Groskop, OBSERVER

‘A lasting literary talent’
—HARPERS’S BAZAAR

‘Mendelson has an ear for unexpected vocabulary and occasional outrageous and starting simile, but her real talent is poetic, for barbed language and a sense of metaphor that’s unerring’
—GLASGOW HERALD

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel takes that most English of literary genres – the boarding school comedy – and spices it with exotic ingredients drawn from Hungarian culture...Almost English is Mendelson’s fourth novel – her previous book, When We Were Bad (2007), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction – and it demonstrates a mastery of narrative craft... the prose is a pure joy...And the whole book is sprinkled with handsome Hungarian phrases – Krumplisaláta, Hogy vagy, Egyszersmind – like a strudel dusted with sugar. It makes for a deliciously moreish read’
—FINANCIAL TIMES

 ‘This Booker longlisted novel muses on family and what it means to be English...We didn’t want it to end!’
—GRAZIA

 ‘Combining frankness with a sharp and intelligent humour, When We Were Bad is an irresistible treat’
—GUARDIAN

‘Unique and utterly recognisable...extraordinary eye for human behaviour...an irresistible treat’
—GUARDIAN pb

‘As the granddaughter of Hungarian immigrants to the UK, it was perhaps inevitable that the novelist Charlotte Mendelson would one day mine her family’s experiences. Given that the resulting novel is Almost English – a tale of adolescent insecurity, secrets and lies and the eccentricities of the émigré – it’s to our gain that she did...Two stories are delightfully interwoven to reach a climax in which various secrets come to life...Almost English is a colourful, clever novel with more than enough intrigue to keep you turning the pages’ Book of the Week,
—JEWISH CHRONICLE

‘Almost English is long-listed for this year’s Man Booker Prize, and Charlotte Mendelson writes of the inner monologues and quiet frustrations that plague an all-female, half-Hungarian household trying to fit into society with a wry humour that carries echoes of Zadie Smith and Zoe Heller’
—STYLIST

‘The Booker longlisted novel is a warm, wry and lively account of teenager Marina...the humanity in Mendelson’s observations and her clever, comic writing make this a sparkling treat’
—METRO

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s fourth novel is a deliciously funny tale of dysfunctional families. The Farkases recall characters from fairy tales or Roald Dahl: an all-female household comprising three pensioners, an abandoned wife and a teenage girl squeezed into a tiny flat “in the barely respectable depths of Bayswater”. Reading Mendelson’s easy, assured prose is like sinking into something soft and velvety’
—TELEGRAPH, Top 10 Summer Holiday Reads

 ‘Charlotte Mendelson has said that she’s drawn to dysfunctional families with secrets. Her fourth novel, longlisted for the Booker Prize, harvests more strange fruit from this fertile soil...Marina is an excruciatingly authentic adolescent: self-obsessed, self-loathing and crashingly gauche in adult company. There are exquisitely embarrassing moments both in her stumbling adventures and in her mother’s. This is a very funny novel, dancing close to farce without ever mistreating its characters. Even Laura, who has hit her forties while avoiding adulthood, is drawn with great tenderness. It is Laura and Marina’s story, but the Hungarian sisters have several scene-stealing turns. Reading Mendelson’s easy, assured prose is like sinking into something soft and velvety. You almost sigh with pleasure...this is such a warm book, my advice is simply to sit back and enjoy it’ —TELEGRAPH

 ‘Almost English, her fourth novel, has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize and it isn't difficult to see why: it is a little masterpiece of characterisation and milieu...Mendelson is wonderful on the fraught mother-daughter bond and on both the claustrophobia and delights of domestic family life, which are rendered in sentences crammed with telling incidentals. (This is perhaps my favourite pair: "Zsuzsi, watching through her gills, unwraps another marron glace. She has been waiting all day for Laura to paint her toenails Havana Moon." It's the "gills" that does it. Or maybe the Havana Moon.) But where Mendelson succeeds is in the way she shows us how hard we will fight to escape what we love most; how we jeopardise it even when we want to protect it more than anything’

—GUARDIAN

‘This is a coming-of-age story that fuses an English boarding school farce with a Chekhovian tragicomedy — but always has something of a fairytale running through it’
—EVENING STANDARD

‘Mendelson's account of imperfect escape is as witty as it is painful'
—GUARDIAN, Holiday reading 

‘The awkwardness and petty agonies of a teenage girl are perfectly captured in this Booker longlisted new novel... both poignant and effortlessly profound’
—Book of the Week, MAIL ON SUNDAY

‘Almost English is as good as we’d hoped...This funny, wise and heart-warming 1980s-set novel is perfect summer reading’
—ELLE

‘I loved Mendelson’s last book When We Were Bad – and this one’s just as good... This story is full of sharp observations and touching characters’
—ESSENTIALS

‘There can’t possibly exist anyone who escaped adolescence without feeling like an outsider at one point or another. So everyone should be able to empathise with Marina, the outwardly reserved but inwardly passionate teenager at the centre of this new offering from the author of When We Were Bad...This is a fun, fierce story about love, family, being yourself and ‘the ugly years’’
—PSYCHOLOGIES

‘Mendelson’s wonderfully tortured Man Booker longlisted drama of secrets and longings...In a novel packed with sly observation and stealthy wit, this is just one moment: Almost English is a finely executed comedy of manners, with a dark side...Mendelson has produced three critically acclaimed novels already, including the Orange Prize-shortlisted When We Were Bad. Here again, she masterminds events with wit and ingenuity, shifting moods from darkness to light in an instant, and delivering some glorious moments of uproarious comedy. In Marina and Laura’s troubled relationship she finds a powerful source of dramatic tension; but it’s not the only one. Plot twists abound...Tensions build, a real crisis looms, and family history is revealed; and in a scene of outrageous farce, Marina and Laura rediscover their bond, the latter learning to take control of her life again. So the novel ends in optimism. But Almost English isn’t blinkered, or naïve. One of its charms is its apparent simplicity, masquerading as something light; just a good read. Don’t be fooled. Call it Jane Austen for the 21st century – a novel on a small scale, full of private preoccupations and a mischievously overblown supporting cast; a novel that nevertheless says something profound about the human condition’
—SCOTSMAN

Fast-paced and engaging…brilliant…touching and true’ Naomi Alderman,
—FINANCIAL TIMES

‘Extremely funny and acutely painful... glitters with stylistic panache and moral force... masterfully evokes the complex web of emotions that yokes her well-realised characters together’
—SUNDAY TELEGRAPH

‘The Great English Jewish novel may not yet have been written, but authors like Naomi Alderman and Howard Jacobson have made impressive attempts at it.  The award-winning Charlotte Mendelson is, however, in a class of her own…When We Were Bad could have been just another chatty romp through middle-class north London life, but it is widened and deepened by Mendelson’s inability to write a dull sentence….consistently well-turned phrases and sharp ear for comedy… compulsive… as full of laughs as it is of tears.  Indeed, the only fault I could find with it is that, as every north Londoner knows, when you exit East Finchley underground station, you go down the stairs and not up.  And as that’s the only imperfection in this stunning tapestry of contemporary Jewish life, we can only hope that the Mendelson mantelpiece has room for some more silverware’
—Melissa Katsoulis TABLET

‘Brilliant…highly entertaining’
– INDEPENDENT

‘Funny and emotionally true, this is a comedy with the warmest of hearts and the most deliciously subversive of agendas’ 
—Book of the Month, MARIE CLAIRE

‘I loved this, I really loved this...a sharp, kind, funny, old-fashioned family story...really, really wonderful’
—The Weekender BBC RADIO 2

‘Enthralling…Written in a present-tense third person that Mendelson inhabits confidently, the novel has an admirable stylistic restlessness.  She can take risks and get away with it.  There are moments of subtle lyricism, best of all when Frances, hopeless as a new mother and step-mother, comes, like a frozen statue, slowly, hopefully back to life… Engrossing…emotional depth and stylistic boldness’
—Olivia Cole, LITERARY REVIEW

‘Written with tremendous authority, insight, humour and even wisdom…convincing and moving…funny, absorbing and certain to linger in the imagination’
—SPECTATOR

‘A winning tale of a close-knit Jewish family bridling against the ties of love and duty that connect parents and children.’
—GUARDIAN, ‘Books of 2007’ preview

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad is a perfervid romantic comedy, elegantly written and wonderfully readable’
Helen Simpson, NEW STATESMAN holiday reading

‘The wickedly funny and astutely observed story of a Jewish family in thrall to a fabulous but flawed matriarch’ 
—SUNDAY EXPRESS

‘Wisdom and waspish humour abound in this sharp portrayal’
—SUNDAY TIMES

‘Never has the perfect family cracked and crumbled with such elegance, warmth and humour’
—Meg Rosoff

‘The guilt, the shame, the triumphs, the love and anxieties of family life - Mendelson unpeels the layers like an onion. And she’s so funny; so cross and yet so kind. And so much happens. A novel to devour’
—Fay Weldon

‘When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson is a big, bright family affair, combining writing to linger over, a plot to race through and characters to care about. The story of a north London Jewish clan who seem “doomed to happiness”. It investigates their individual crises and epiphanies with cleverness and charm’
—GUARDIAN

‘Our pick of the Orange bunch’ 
—GUARDIAN WEEKEND

‘Mendelson has a rare gift when it comes to bringing her characters alive’ 
—Erica Wagner, THE TIMES

 ‘Never has the perfect family cracked and crumbled with such elegance,warmth and humour.  I read all day and night, neglecting my own family
shamelessly’
—Meg Rosoff

 ‘An absolutely spell-binding book, so funny, so moving, so totally believable - I felt part of the Rubins as I read... wonderful and totally compulsive’
—Jacqueline Wilson

‘This book explores family life with amazing warmth and wit.  It sweeps you up and holds you tight until the very last page’

—EVE

‘Entertaining, intelligent…difficult to put down…A funny, humane novel about a "perfect" family on the rocks…[Mendelson] is a wonderful writer, economical, inventive, and, when appropriate, lyrical’
—BOSTON GLOBE

‘Philip Roth has said that his fiction is about people in trouble, and trouble is what Mendelson proves so good at making for her characters. Like Roth in … Portnoy’s Complaint, Mendelson succeeds in creating a family environment that is both appealing and appalling. When We Were Bad is a funny, smart and delightfully ambivalent novel about surviving the people who love us most’
—MONTREAL GAZETTE

‘A Jewish London family and its rabbinical matriarch cope with disgrace, romantic disaster and familial eccentricity. Mendelson’s immensely funny and affecting third novel pivots on its bravura opening sequence and then sustains its narrative energy’
—BALTIMORE SUN

‘Engrossing, clever and frequently funny portrayal of Britain’s Jewish intellectual elite. It is about matriarchy, leaving home, growing up (or maybe not), finding purpose and meaning. Like Mark Haddon’s A Spot of Bother, another fine British novel about family, When We Were Bad is also largely about dysfunction - and resolution.  Its cheeky, witty author, Charlotte Mendelson, is a master of the brittle and the sharp, but she’s also unexpectedly tender, deepening When We Were Bad with warmth at its graceful conclusion. A biting, dramatic comedy of manners …winning’
—ST PETERSBURG TIMES (Florida)

 ‘The glamorous facade of a distinguished Jewish clan in London crumbles after a wedding-day disaster in Charlotte Mendelson’s incomparably arch When We Were Bad’
—VOGUE (US)

‘In When We Were Bad, rising British author Charlotte Mendelson trains her irreverent eye on a seemingly glamorous, close-knit London clan led by a distinctive matriarch: a sexy, domineering rabbi…Mendelson’s satiric but empathetic style ensures that the Rubins are more than smartly sketched cartoon characters’
—USA TODAY

‘A completely brilliant book. Breathtakingly good’
—BARBARA TRAPIDO

‘Absolutely spellbinding, so funny, so moving, so totally believable’
—Jacqueline Wilson

‘Charlotte Mendelson is one of our most exciting young novelists… She has no peer for dramatizing the tangled web of family relationships and loyalties, for exploring the perils of intellectualism and self-satisfaction.  Her fiction excels at showing the curious ways by which sexual passion can take us by surprise… Mendelson has a gift for showing characters conflicted between their wish to show loyalty to their families, and their desire to follow their own sexual path… Frances is a typical Mendelson heroine:  sensitive, bookish, rather clumsy, and passionate.  The book traces how she is bowled over, undone and finally liberated by her own integrity… When We Were Bad is a tale of twists, in which the careful excellence of Mendelson’s plotting keeps the reader turning the pages, gripped by the characters’ muddled attempts to live their lives without hurting each other… The novel that came to my mind was Jonathan Franzen’s smash hit, The Corrections.  Like Franzen, Mendelson dissects the most complex family issues, and can show through a few words the painful tensions and histories that can lie under the most innocuous words.  They share a skill for set pieces and a tender eye for detail… Mendelson and Franzen have a talent for short, pitch-perfect dialogue, and a skill at showing the workings of the human mind… When We Were Bad is a bold, brilliant, beautiful novel and a touching, poignant and often hilarious rollercoaster ride through sex, secrets and family love.  A shoo-in for the Orange or Booker prize, surely’ 
—THE BOOK MAGAZINE

‘Mendelson relishes her task, veering thrillingly close to pathos, farce and melodramatic emotion, deploying a style that reads like high gossip at times, but always maintaining poise by lancing the text with barbs of wit… such grace and immaculate lightness’ 
—Tom Adair, SCOTLAND ON SUNDAY

‘With great delicacy and elliptical prose, Mendelson draws a subtle and compassionate picture of a family as it unravels.  A novel about secrets and the damage they cause… impressive’
—Tina Jackson, METRO

‘Compelling…Gathered for their son Leo’s wedding, the Rubin family are stunned when Leo makes a bolt for the door, taking the rabbi’s wife with him.  A poignant and compassionate novel of a family in crisis as one member after another faces some home truths’
—WOMAN AND HOME

‘Secret thoughts and unnameable hangups are teased out in glowing, metaphorical and often very funny prose…Mendelson explores the shadows and ghosts haunting a family which appears to outsiders to be a harmonious, messy, intellectual ideal’
— TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENTT

‘Brilliant...works on a universal level…Mendelson demonstrates with clarity and aplomb that her satiric razor cuts beyond possible stereotypes to reveal empathy for all her characters. Only when the Rubins release themselves from fear do they truly begin to know themselves. By being bad, they act just the opposite and find their humanity and goodness’
—Sarah Wienman, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER

‘A witty assassination of North London Jewish matriarchy by an award-winning British novelist....astute, affectionately mocking prose and a wicked but merciful intelligence’
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

‘“The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness.”...in this wicked tale, Mendelson gives us family unhappiness not as tragedy but as farce.  Mendelson has been selected by Waterstone’s as one of the “25 authors for the future” and When We Were Bad—a British-Jewish-family comedy of manners—displays her sharp wit and sure grasp of human foibles, the conflicting demands of family loyalty and independence, the conjoining of love and revenge… a bloody good read’
—PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

‘Charlotte Mendelson’s When We Were Bad was one of 2007’s most Jewish books, as well as being one of its most popular (certainly in North London)....intense and funny tale of a priceless family ruled by a glamorous female rabbi’ 
—JEWISH CHRONICLE

‘A witty and absorbing work of fiction…wonderful…surprising and satisfying’
—TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT

‘Brilliantly observed...acerbic social comedy of the most unflinching, satisfying kind’
—Caroline Gascoigne THE SUNDAY TIMES

‘Charlotte Mendelson seems to bear a grudge against the whole of Oxford.  And I’m glad.  Her tale...had me guiltily neglecting both work and household responsibilities for the day I was glued to it...Mendelson turns the pressure up and up.  This is funny, moving and gorgeously bitchy’
—TELEGRAPH