In When We Were Bad, which like the previous novel is spiced with the comedy of human foibles, she draws on another aspect of her background: her Jewish heritage. In her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, which won the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize and the Somerset Maugham Award, Mendelson drew on her own upbringing as the self-professed 'bluestocking' daughter of an Oxford academic to write a story about a family breakdown in the university town. I'm interested in the way all this is seething under the surface of the most calm-looking person.' 'I'm convinced we've all got buried emotions and passions‚we despise the person who's supposed to be our best friend we want to stab our boss, or marry our boss.

'I love writing about families in crisis, and the thing I particularly like is secret love and secret hatred,' she explains energetically, shaking her long hair. It is, explains the effervescent Mendelson, associate publisher at Headline Review, a moment of the kind that draws her to fiction. He has come to the apocalyptic realisation that he is deeply in love‚not with his bride, who is walking up the aisle at that moment, but with Helen, the wife of the rabbi who is about to conduct the service, with whom he has been having a secret affair. Charlotte Mendelson's third novel, When We Were Bad (Picador, May), opens with Leo, elder son of charismatic female rabbi and media personality Claudia Rubin, walking out on his wedding, in a crowded synagogue, surrounded by the faithful.

When We Were Bad by Charlotte Mendelson