Almost English

Man Booker Prize-longlisted novel takes that most English of literary genres -- the boarding school comedy -- and spices it with exotic ingredients drawn from Hungarian culture ... Almost English is Mendelson's fourth novel -- her previous book, When We Were Bad (2007), was shortlisted for the Orange Prize for Fiction -- and it demonstrates a mastery of narrative craft ... the prose is a pure joy ... And the whole book is sprinkled with handsome Hungarian phrases -- Krumplisalata, Hogy vagy, Egyszersmind -- like a strudel dusted with sugar. It makes for a deliciously moreish read' Financial Times 'The Booker longlisted novel is a warm, wry and lively account of teenager Marina ... the humanity in Mendelson's observations and her clever, comic writing make this a sparkling treat' Metro 'Almost English is long-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize, and Charlotte Mendelson writes of the inner monologues and quiet frustrations that plague an all-female, half-Hungarian household trying to fit into society with a wry humour that carries echoes of Zadie Smith and Zoe Heller' Stylist Top 10 must-reads of August 'Mendelson's wonderfully tortured Man Booker longlisted drama of secrets and longings ... In a novel packed with sly observation and stealthy wit, this is just one moment: Almost English is a finely executed comedy of manners, with a dark side ... Mendelson has produced three critically acclaimed novels already, including the Orange Prize-shortlisted When We Were Bad. Here again, she masterminds events with wit and ingenuity, shifting moods from darkness to light in an instant, and delivering some glorious moments of uproarious comedy. In Marina and Laura's troubled relationship she finds a powerful source of dramatic tension; but it's not the only one. Plot twists abound ... Tensions build, a real crisis looms, and family history is revealed ... But Almost English isn't blinkered, or naive. One of its charms is its apparent simplicity, masquerading as something light; just a good read. Don't be fooled. Call it Jane Austen for the 21st century -- a novel on a small scale, full of private preoccupations and a mischievously overblown supporting cast; a novel that nevertheless says something profound about the human condition' Scotsman 'Charlotte Mendelson's characters are always in some kind of exile -- literal, metaphorical and quite often both ... People are constantly either furiously stifling dangerous secrets or rushing to declare them, only to be thwarted at the last minute; misunderstandings multiply and create horrible collision courses; the emotionally desperate are on the verge of being overwhelmed by those more charismatic and canny. All these disasters and near-disasters are recounted in heady prose that manages to unite the comic, the melodramatic and the straightforwardly moving. Almost English, her fourth novel, has just been longlisted for the Man Booker prize and it isn't difficult to see why: it is a little masterpiece of characterisation and milieu.There is plenty of plot and movement in Almost English, many changes of scene and points of view. It all adds to the book's considerable energy, but is not its main achievement ... Mendelson is wonderful on the fraught mother-daughter bond and on both the claustrophobia and delights of domestic family life, which are rendered in sentences crammed with telling incidentals. But where Mendelson succeeds is in the way she shows us how hard we will fight to escape what we love most; how we jeopardise it even when we want to protect it more than anything' Guardian