When We Were Bad

Claudia Rubin is in her heyday. Wife, mother, rabbi and sometime moral voice of the nation, it is she whom everyone wants to be with at her older son’s glorious February wedding. Until Leo becomes a bolter and the heyday of the Rubin family begins to unravel…

His calm, married, more mature sister, Frances, tries to hold the centre together, but the stresses, for Frances, force her to re-examine her own middle way and lead to a decision as shocking in its way as Leo’s has been.

Meanwhile, Claudia’s husband Norman has, uncharacteristically, a secret to hide – a secret whose imminent unveiling he can do nothing about…

Shortlisted for the Orange Prize for fiction 2008

Charlotte Mendelson was born in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. This is her third novel. Her second, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year award. Charlotte lives in London with her family.

Charlotte Mendelson's q & a

What sparked When We Were Bad?
I wanted to describe how hard it can be, even when adult, to escape your family and community - their expectations, the roles they give to their members. And I wanted to explore what it would be like to be in one of those perfect, happy-seeming families when - due to the enormous pressure its members are under - it's all secretly falling apart. And to lift the veil on a little-understood world - that of England's Liberal Jews. But, most of all, I wanted to write about how dark and complicated our secret lives are - secret love and secret hatred, that's what it's all about.

Where and when is the novel set?
It's set in and around Gospel Oak, near Hampstead Heath, in early 2001 - because much changed after September 11, and I wanted my characters to be in ignorance of that.

Do you have a favourite character in the novel?
I love them all, because I understand them...Norman is my inner grumpy old man; poor Leo is led by his libido; Claudia doesn't mean to be a monster; Frances has been living the life others chose for her, and is about to snap...

What's your favourite children's book and why?
Alison Uttley's A Traveller in Time stunned and thrilled me - I hope it still would. But so many others...how long have you got?