Longlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2013.
In a tiny flat in West London, sixteen-year-old Marina lives with her emotionally delicate mother, Laura, and three ancient Hungarian relatives. Imprisoned by her family's crushing expectations and their fierce unEnglish pride, by their strange traditions and stranger foods, she knows she must escape. But the place she runs to makes her feel even more of an outsider. At Combe Abbey, a traditional English public school for which her family have sacrificed everything, she realises she has made a terrible mistake. She is the awkward half-foreign girl who doesn't know how to fit in, flirt or even be. And as a semi-Hungarian Londoner, who is she? In the meantime, her mother Laura, an alien in this strange universe, has her own painful secrets to deal with, especially the return of the last man she'd expect back in her life. She isn't noticing that, at Combe Abbey, things are starting to go terribly wrong.
ISBN: | 9781447219972 |
Publication date: | 1st August 2013 |
Author: | Charlotte Mendelson |
Publisher: | Mantle an imprint of Pan Macmillan |
Format: | Hardback |
Pagination: | 400 pages |
Primary Genre | Modern and Contemporary Fiction |
Other Genres: | |
Recommendations: |
Closing date: 30/05/2022
'Mendelson's novels are perfectly balanced observations of human nature captured in all its hideous glories. As intelligent as it is funny, her writing is brilliant ...A joy' Viv Groskop, Observer
Charlotte Mendelson was born in London in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. She has written and reviewed for, among other places, the TLS, the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday and the Observer and now works as a publisher. She lives in North London with her family.
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