Good afternoon pals,

It's going to be a short Fem Fri today, but I think you're going to love it - I read an author, Charlotte Mendelson, on holiday and she's AMAZING. The books I read were When We Were Bad and Daughters of Jerusalem, but I could have read all of them very happily I think. You'll love them too.

I mean, look at this pullquote (about When We Were Bad). This is exactly my sort of thing:

"I wanted to ramp up the pressure in this book," Mendelson explains. "I thought: 'If you're a rabbi's family, it's not just about scandalising your own family and the neighbours, it's the whole community.' You are on a pedestal with everyone looking at you. It's about increasing the pressure on your characters to behave as badly as possible."

https://www.thebookseller.com/author-interviews/charlotte-mendelson-breaking-ties-bind

OH AND ALSO she loves Iris Murdoch too! Here's an introduction she wrote to Under the Net:

Is this the first Iris Murdoch novel you have ever picked up?  If so, you are not alone.  Her fiction is so extremely unfashionable that, to have reached this point, you’re a brave pioneer, virtually a Scott of the Antarctic of mid-twentieth-century novels.  It isn’t your fault.  Readers, and critics, who should know better, frequently dismiss her; they call her books arch, artificial, mannered, frantic.  As literary criticism goes, this is like writing off Charles Dickens because he was too fond of a silly name, or Jane Austen because everyone gets married.

https://www.charlottemendelson.com/home/2020/7/24/introduction-to-new-vintage-edition-of-under-the-net-by-iris-murdoch-pub-2019

Happy weekend <3

Alex.