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Being Human: Bad Blood
Being Human: Bad Blood
Jul 27, 2025 6:46 AM

Author:James Goss

Being Human: Bad Blood

One of Annie's oldest friends has come looking for her - and what's more amazing is that she's found her. Denise is the ultimate party girl, and she's determined to bring Annie out of her shell. Mitchell is delighted, but George really thinks the last thing they need to do is to go out and meet new people.

Annie and Denise throw themselves into organising a Bingo night at the local sports hall - after all, it's for charity, and what's not to love about having a good time? But why is Denise back in town? Why have Bristol's vampires suddenly started hanging around wherever they go? And why does George get the feeling that Bingo night is going to go horribly, horribly wrong?

Featuring Mitchell, George and Annie, as played by Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey and Lenora Chichlow in the hit series created by Toby Whithouse for BBC Television

Reviews

Kinda Buffy meets This Life...it's sharp, dead funny and sexy

—— Guardian

This is dead good

—— Sunday Times

BBC3's best-ever drama... Required viewing

—— Heat

It is 1968. Paddy Clarke is ten years old, breathless with discovery. He reads with a child's voraciousness, collecting facts the way adults collect grey hairs and parking tickets. Doyle captures the speech patterns of childhood brilliantly, the weird logic of the incessant questions, the non-sequiturs and wonderments... Like all great comic writers, Roddy Doyle has become an explorer of the deepest places of the heart, of love and pain and loss. This is one of the most compelling novels I've read in ages, a triumph of style and perception

—— Irish Times

Extraordinary technical achievement and emotional force

—— Gillian Beer

One of the truest and funniest presentations of juvenile experience in any recent literature

—— Mick Imlah , Independent

Brimming with sadness, but full of fun

—— Sunday Times

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

—— Daily Express

So fluid, the pages turn themselves

—— Daily Mirror

Irresistible comfort read

—— Glamour

Noble is the mistress of the tearjerking message of love

—— Express

Tissues are essential. You'll ricochet between delicately watering eyes at the romance of it all and howling sobs at the unbearable tenderness

—— Heat

It would be a hard heart indeed that remained unmoved . . . the tender feelings that Noble engenders in her readers are to be cherished

—— Daily Express

It's one of the best accounts of clever English schoolboyhood I've read

—— Times Educational Supplement

Irony and imagery are deployed with a finesse even Flaubert wouldn't wince at...consummately elegant

—— Sunday Times

Sinister, shocking and extremely powerful

—— Woman & Home

Wonderful

—— Red

Her writing is always thrilling and this is much more than simply a page-turner

—— Jane Wheatley , The Times

A successful novel, well made and written with a light touch

—— Alex Clark , The Guardian

It is beautifully written, and elegantly edited, and manages to pack in vivid characterisations built on tragic family histories... With its strong structure and interesting themes, it could be a textbook example of how to write a modern novel

—— Third Way

Satisfying death-blow to place-in-the-sun escapism

—— Boyd Tonkin , Independent Summer Reads

A compelling novel

—— Tatler

A wry family black comedy, a study in revenge, and an unlikely, if sinister, thriller...a characteristically intelligent, well constructed narrative... The prose is precise and fluent, the tone is neutral, and Tremain makes effective use of the fact that many adults remain children

—— Eileen Battersby , The Irish Times

A criss-crossing, sinuous tale of muted passion and sibling rivarly - and affection - set in the Cevennes. Its peculiar, particular atmosphere is conjured perfectly

—— Erica Wagner , The Times, Christmas round up

A haunting and perfectly poised tale of incest and antiques.

—— Frances Wilson , Daily Telegraph, Christmas round up

Creepily affecting

—— Katy Guest , Independent on Sunday, Christmas round up

Chilling and vivid

—— Charlotte Vowden , Daily Express

Surely one of the most versatile novelists writing today... The scene-setting opening is languorous and beautiful, giving full rein to Tremain's descriptive gifts... A disturbing tale and one rich in detail

—— Daily Express

Intriguing

—— James Urquhart , Financial Times

Tremain expertly heightens the tension in a cleverly fashioned and astutely observed novel that reads like a cross between Ruth Rendell and Jean de Florette

—— Simon Shaw , Mail on Sunday

Tremain's extraordinary imagination has produced a powerful, unsettling novel in which two worlds and cultures collide

—— Cath Kidson Magazine

Tremain writes about this part of France so well because she has known it since childhood, and she captures a sensuality in the landscape that is both attractive and eerie... It is an enthralling book about the catastrophic disruption honesty can bring

—— Siobhan Kane , Irish Times

The novel has all the formal structure of a medieval morality tale, along with its traditional dichotomies: rus and urbe, avarice and asceticism, chastity and lust

—— Guardian

Rose Tremain's thrilling Trespass is set in an obsure valley in Southern France... To be read slowly; Tremain's writing is too exquisite to hurry

—— The Times

Timeless but rooted; tangible but otherworldly. Meticulously plotted, with the musty sadness that comes of cleaving to the past, Trespass will reward your reading time

—— Scotland on Sunday

Rose Tremain's novel begins with a scream and barely loosens its grip amid the sumptuously written pages that follow...subtly harnesses the stifling heat and dangerously feral landscape of southern France to unspool a psychologically disconcerting story of family skeletons and outsider tensions

—— Metro

Like a sinister edition of A Place In the Sun directed by Alfred Hitchcock, with the depth and subtlety that make the book far more than a mere thriller

—— You Magazine (Daily Mail)
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