Best Selling Books by Lorna Sage

Whitbread Award Winner: A memoirist “conjures up her claustrophobic childhood in the small Welsh village of Hanmer with wit and unsentimental clarity” (The New York Times). 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, Lorna Sage’s prose brings to life 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. “Her father was off fighting in World War II, her mother off in her own dreamy rerun of adolescence, so young Lorna hung onto the ‘skirts’ of her vicar grandpa, a histrionic, bitterly intelligent philanderer . . . Sage finds such delicious ironies in all the awful detail that readers can’t help but be entertained., wickedly . . . perfect book club reading.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “She lifts your spirits even as she hurts your heart.” —Daily Telegraph “Deeply affecting and beautifully written.” —People “Evocative, enthralling, often hilarious.” —Los Angeles Times “A superb memoir of a daughter of the ’50s who got knocked up, but not knocked down.” —Maureen Corrigan, NPR’s Fresh Air

One of the most critically acclaimed memoirs ever written. One of the ten books - novels, memoirs and one very unusual biography - that make up our Matchbook Classics'' series, a stunningly redesigned collection of some of the best loved titles on our backlist.

Doris Lessing was one of the most impressive, prolific and vital of twentieth century writers. Her fiction is obsessed with the workings of cultural change and she radically extended the novel’s scope – most famously and influentially in The Golden Notebook – by questioning the realist tradition she inherited and the wider social beliefs about self, sexuality and authority which that tradition symbolized. This study, originally published in 1983, surveys her epic output from her early, African writings to her later experiments with space fiction. It traces her struggles to decentre imaginative life and to erase and to redraw the boundaries of our mental maps in favour of values on the margins of the official culture.

A sparkling collection of journalism from the critically acclaimed author of Bad Blood and Moments Of Truth. in which she wrote for the London and New York literary papers and journals. From carefully worked interviews and profiles, to the snappiest and deftest of weekly reviews, it contains some of her best writing. We can trace the often surprising development of her distinctive voice and follow its sharpest critical reactions to the important authors and landmark publications of our times. Shelley or Sylvia Plath, Angela Carter, Umberto Eco and Salman Rushdie, Sage''s unmistakable voice is here: intelligent, hilarious, anarchic, courageous, genial and serious.

This Guide aims to consolidate and epitomise the re-reading of women''s writing that has gone on in the last twenty-five years. This is an opportunity for stock-taking - a timely project, when so much writing has been rediscovered, reclaimed and republished. There are entries on writers, on individual texts, and on general terms, genres and movements, all printed in a single alphabetical sequence. The earliest written documents in medieval English (the visionary writings of Julian of Norwich and Margery Kempe) are covered in an historical - and geographical - sweep that takes us up to the present day. The book reflects the spread of literacy, the history of colonisation and the development of post-colonial cultures using and changing the English language. The entries are written by contributors from all the countries covered. The result is a work of reference with a unique feeling for the vitality, wealth and diversity of women''s writing.

Lorna Sage provides a fascinating study of the works of Angela Carter - the most inventive British novelist of her generation. All of Carter''s novels and short stories are covered, as well as some non-fiction.

The novel was once upon a time the genre women felt at home in. This wide- ranging and detailed study of contemporary novelists explores the forms of nostalgia (shared by many feminist critics) for a ''woman''s novel''; and the subtle or savage strategies which have turned the house of fiction upside down. The result is a critique of the nature of narrative now; and a celebration of the energies that are undoing our definitions of women''s work.

This book looks at the process by which particular books materialized against the odds. This collection of essays on the most influential women writers of the first half of the last century is a mixture of close reading with a sensitivity to nuances, and biographical exploration.

Gale Researcher Guide for: Doris Lessing''s The Golden Notebook is selected from Gale''s academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.