Bad Blood

“Lorna Sage’s early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather – a drinking, womanising vicar, exiled to a parish in rural Wales. When the war ended and she left the gothic eccentricity of his vicarage for her parents’ stark new council house, she soon discovered that real family life was marked by myths, secrets and disappointments of its own. Longing to escape, Lorna swore she would never settle down until, growing up too fast, she found herself pregnant at sixteen.

A dazzlingly vivd account of one girl’s coming-of-age in post-war provincial Britain, Bad Blood is now universally acclaimed as one of the most extraordinary memoirs of the last decade.”

“From a childhood of gothic proportions, through teenage pregnancy in the 1960s, Lorna Sage vividly and wittily brings to life a vanished time and place and illuminates the lives of three generations of women in one of the most critically acclaimed memoirs of all time.

Lorna Sage’s outstanding memoir of childhood and adolescence brings to life her eccentric family and bizarre upbringing in rural Wales.

The period is evoked through a wickedly funny and deeply intelligent account: 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 Lorna’s pregnancy at 16 outraged those around her, an event her grandmother blamed on the fiendish invention of sex.

Bad Blood vividly and wittily explores a vanished time and place, and illuminates the lives of three generations of women.”