"'The Rubin family, everybody agrees, seems doomed to happiness'" Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, everyone wants to be with her at her older son's glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel . . . "When We Were Bad" is a warm, poignant and true portrayal of a London family in crisis, in love, in denial and - ultimately - in luck.
Author
Charlotte Mendelson (born 1972) is a British novelist and editor. Her maternal grandparents were, in her words, "Hungarian-speaking-Czech, Ruthenian for about 10 minutes, Carpathian mountain-y, impossible to describe", who left Prague in 1939. When she was two, she moved with her parents and her baby sister to a house in a cobbled passage next to St John's College, Oxford, where her father taught public international law. After the King's School, Canterbury,she studied Ancient and Modern History at the University of Oxford, even though she knows now, with great regret, that what would have suited her best was English literature at somewhere like Leeds. She says she became a lesbian suddenly. "It was boyfriends up to 22 or 23. Not a whiff of lesbianism. Not even a thought. But I'm very all or nothing. It was all that, and now it's all this. There was about a 10-minute cross-over period of uncertainty, but it was really not that bad." She has two children with the journalist and novelist Joanna Briscoe. She won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize in 2003 and the Somerset Maugham Award in 2004 for her second novel Daughters of Jerusalem. She was shortlisted for the Sunday Times 'Young Writer of the Year Award in 2003.She contributes regularly to the TLS, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer. She is an editor at the publishers Headline Review. She was placed 60th on the Independent on Sunday Pink List 2007
