Charlotte Mendelson Bücher

Wer Familie hat, braucht keine Feinde Wie eine Königin herrscht Mutter Claudia im Hause Rubin. Die erfolgreiche, attraktive Rabbinerin dirigiert souverän ihren Mann und die vier Kinder und zelebriert gern auch in der Öffentlichkeit ihr perfektes Familienleben. Doch als der älteste Sohn endlich heiraten soll und seine Braut in letzter Minute sitzen lässt, stellen plötzlich auch die anderen Familienmitglieder fest, wie reizvoll es ist, endlich den eigenen Träumen zu folgen, statt nach Mutters Pfeife zu tanzen … Charlotte Mendelson wurde mit dem 'Somerset Maugham'- und dem 'John Llewellyn'-Prize ausgezeichnet.

A unique celebration of gardening written by an award-winning novelist.

Gardening can be viewed as a largely pointless hobby, but the evangelical zeal and camaraderie it generates is unique. Charlotte Mendelson is perhaps unusually passionate about it. For despite her superficially normal existence, despite the fact that she has only six square metres of grotty urban soil and a few pots, she has a secret life. She is an extreme gardener, an obsessive, an addict. And like all addicts, she wants to spread the joy. Her garden may look like a nasty drunk old man's mini-allotment, chaotic, virtually flowerless, with weird recycling and nowhere to sit. When honoured friends are shown it, they tend to laugh. However, it is actually a tiny jungle, a minuscule farm, a wildly uneconomical experiment in intensive edible cultivation, on which she grows a taste of perhaps a hundred kinds of delicious fruits and odd vegetables. It is a source of infinite happiness and deep peace. It looks completely bonkers. Arguably, it's the most expensive, time-consuming, undecorative and self-indulgent way to grow a salad ever invented, but when tired or sad or cross it never fails to delight.

Behind a crumbling facade of seeming normality, secrets begin to stir within the Lux family home. Jean Lux, constrained academic wife and guilty mother, is waiting for excitement – and it will come from an unexpected source. Meanwhile Eve, her intelligent elder daughter, luxuriates in wounded jealousy, until her loathing for her only sister verges on the murderous. Into this climate of static repression and bitterness enters Raymond Snow, the deadly rival of Jean’s husband, who begins to show interest in the vulnerable Eve. Meanwhile, Jean’s best friend, Helena, has something she is yearning to tell: a confession that may alter everyone’s life forever. Beautifully written and very funny, Daughters of Jerusalem is a gripping tale of hidden love and hate, of the desire to belong and the need for escape.

A beautifully observed novel by literary star Charlotte Mendelson about the joys of passionate love and those left in its wake, told with Charlotte’s signature wit and wisdom.

The fifth novel from Man Booker-longlisted and twice-longlisted Womens Prize author Charlotte Mendelson.

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. The extraordinary new novel from the Orange Prize shortlisted author of When We Were Bad.