When We Were Bad
by Charlotte Mendelson
Picador ₤12.99, 369 pages
FT bookshop price: ₤10.39

Is it only in Jewish families that adult children can still be struggling to break away from their parents into their 30s, 40s and beyond? Perhaps not, but it’s a common pattern among Jews, for whom even marriage and children do not always signal the completion of passage into independent adulthood. This is certainly the case with the Rubins – the family dissected by Charlotte Mendelson in When We Were Bad .