Family Affairs

Here, three highly distinctive writers explore dysfunctional families; mining relationships, love and betrayals, secrets and lies.

When We Were Bad, Charlotte Mendelson's novel, tells the story of a high profile woman rabbi’s family in total disarray. In Rutu Modan’s beautifully drawn graphic novel, Exit Wounds, the search for a man feared dead in a terrorist attack reveals someone neither his son nor his lover knew. Blake Morrison wrote two moving memoirs uncovering the lives of both his parents.

Charlotte Mendelson was born in London in 1972 and grew up in Oxford.  She has written and reviewed for the Guardian, the TLS, the Independent on Sunday, the Observer and elsewhere. Her first novel, Love in Idleness, was largely written in her lunch breaks at work.  For Daughters of Jerusalem, she was awarded the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, and was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award.  Charlotte also received the London Arts New London Writers’ Award and was shortlisted for Le Prince Maurice Roman d’Amour Prize and the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize. Her third novel, When We Were Bad, was published in May 2007. She has been named one of Waterstone’s 25 Authors for the Future.

Rutu Modan, an illustrator and comic book creator, is a chosen artist of the Israel Cultural Excellence Foundation. She has created comic strips for the Israeli newpapers Yedioth Acharonot and Maariv and illustrations for The New Yorker, Le Monde, The New York Times and many other publications. Her first graphic novel, Exit Wounds, was published in June. Rutu Modan, usually based in Tel Aviv, is currently in Sheffield, England. Watch her talk about her work.

Blake Morrison is Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, a former Chairman of the Poetry Book Society, a member of the Literature Panel of the Arts Council of England and Vice-Chairman of English PEN.
His non-fiction books include And When Did You Last See Your Father? , an honest and moving account of his father's life and death and Things My Mother Never Told Me, a memoir of his mother. As If is about the trial of the two young boys convicted of killing the toddler James Bulger in Liverpool. His poetry includes the collections Dark Glasses, The Ballad of the Yorkshire Ripperand Pendle Witches. He is also a novelist, The Justification of Johann Gutenberg and most recently South of the River. He has written a number of essays, plays and a children’s book.

Hephzibah Anderson is Fiction Editor of the Daily Mail

In association with JLifestyle, www.jlifestyle.co.uk