Almost English by Charlotte Mendelson

Longlisted for the 2013 Booker Prize and the 2014 Baileys Women's Prize for Fiction

Home 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.

Charlotte Mendelson has written several novels to great acclaim. Daughters of Jerusalem, was the winner of the Somerset Maugham Award and John Llewellyn Rhys Prize. When We Were Bad was shortlisted for the 2008 Orange Prize for Fiction and a book of the year in The Observer, The Guardian, The Sunday Times, The New Statesman and The Spectator. The Exhibitionist was longlisted for the 2022 Women's Prize for Fiction and nominated for the 2022/23 Comedy Women in Print Prize. She is also the author of the novel Love in Idleness, the nonfiction Rhapsody in Green, and is the gardening correspondent for The New Yorker. Charlotte lives in London, England.