A rising British star makes her American debut with an excoriatingly funny yet deeply humane novel about a glamorous London family that happens to be falling apart.
By all outward appearances, the Rubins are the perfect family: brilliant, successful, enviably close-knit. Then an event of great joy and celebration -- the marriage of the eldest son -- urns to chaos when the groom jilts his bride and runs off with a married woman. It's a shock to everyone in their small Jewish community, most of all to matriarch Claudia, a successful rabbi. In the wake of this one defiant act, the floodgates to a ruinous wave of gossip are opened, and the secrets that the Rubins have been keeping from one another begin to spill forth. All four adult Rubin children and their parents ultimately must come to terms with their own inner desires and identities. When We Were Bad gives a warm, poignant, and honest portrayal of a family in crisis, in love, in denial, and, ultimately, in luck.