CHARLOTTE MENDELSON was born in 1972 and grew up in Oxford. Her second novel, Daughters of Jerusalem, won the Somerset Maugham Award and the John Llewellyn Rhys Prize, and she was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award. Her third, When We Were Bad, was shortlisted for the Orange Broadband Prize for Fiction 2008. Charlotte lives in London with her family.