Bad Blood

Blood trickles down through every generation, steeps into every marriage. Lorna Sage's autobiography is a searing and funny anatomy of three marriages. Her early childhood was dominated by her brilliant, bitter grandfather, a boozer, a womanizer, a vicar exiled to a remote village on the Welsh borders. His wife loathed him, lived on memories and shook her fist at any parishioner bold enough to call at the house. From the vicarage Lorna watched the fading away of the old world and the slow dissolve of her grandparents' disastrous union. Then father returns from the army, grandfather dies, and she moves with her parents and baby brother into a newly built council house. The open-plan future is a place of rural dereliction. Living with her real parents she quickly learns that the post-war world is full of secrets and myths that mark her family--her mother's thwarted dreams, her father's addiction to work, and mysterious emotional economy of their proper marriage. Longing to leave, Lorna vows she will never marry or have children. But she grows up so fast that she finds herself pregnant without realizing she has lost her virginity. In one of the most extraordinary memoirs of recent years, Bad Blood brings to life in vivid detail the 1940's and 50's and the country of Wales. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, it is unsurpassed.