![]() ![]() The family, super-star Rabbi Claudia Rubin - picture buxom beauty Nigella Lawson wearing a tallis - and her author-husband Norman, have raised together four children, all of whom are still part of the family, even at the advanced ages of. She isn’t noticing that, at Combe Abbey, things are starting to go terribly wrong. British author Charlotte Mendelson gives us the Rubin family of Hampstead in her novel, 'When We Were Bad'. And as a semi-Hungarian Londoner, who is she? In the meantime, her mother Laura, an alien in this strange universe, has her own painful secrets to deal with, especially the return of the last man she’d expect back in her life. She is the awkward half-foreign girl who doesn’t know how to fit in, flirt or even be. At Combe Abbey, a traditional English public school for which her family have sacrificed everything, she realises she has made a terrible mistake. But the place she runs to makes her feel even more of an outsider. Imprisoned by her family’s crushing expectations and their fierce unEnglish pride, by their strange traditions and stranger foods, she knows she must escape. In When We Were Bad, Mendelson’s main character, Claudia Rubin, a rabbi with an influence far beyond her Belsize Park community, indeed beyond the Jewish community as a whole, is an earthy beauty, a brilliant schtuppable pioneer, with a forthcoming book on morality in the modern world. In a tiny flat in West London, sixteen-year-old Marina lives with her emotionally delicate mother, Laura, and three ancient Hungarian relatives. Home is a foreign country: they do things differently there. The extraordinary new novel from the Orange Prize shortlisted author of When We Were Bad. LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2013 ![]()
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