Charlotte Mendelson Libros

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.

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.

The dazzling Orange Prize shortlisted novel of a family in crisis

The Orange shortlisted author's haunting debut about the pursuit of passion.

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

Longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for FictionHome is a foreign country: they do things differently there...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 un-English 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.

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.