?The bad blood had missed a generation. You're just like your grandfather, my mother said.?

Blood trickles down through every generation, seeps into every marriage. An international bestseller and winner of the Whitbread Biography Award, Bad Blood is a tragicomic memoir of one woman's escape from a claustrophobic childhood in post?World War II Britain and the story of three generations of a family?its triumphs and its darkest secrets.

With wit and a dose of self-deprecating humor, Sage's prose brings to life in vivid detail a period?the 1940s and 1950s?that continues to influence and shape society in the twenty-first century. As a portrait of a family and a young girl's place in it, Bad Blood is unsurpassed.

An influential literary critic, Lorna Sage was a professor of English at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, England. Her other books include Women in the House of Fiction, The Cambridge Guide to Women's Writing in English, and a study of the novelist Angela Carter. She died in 2001.