Tessa Hadley

Three adult sisters and their brother meet up at their grandparents' country home for their annual family holiday three long, hot summer weeks. The beloved but crumbling house is full of memories of their childhood of when their mother took them to stay with her parents when she left their father but this could be their last summer in the house, now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic pastoral surface, there are tensions.

The Past

“With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she’s one of the greatest stylists alive.”—Ron Charles, Washington Post New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice |A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick | Powell’s Indispensable Book Club Pick The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who “recruits admirers with each book” (Hilary Mantel). Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer’s evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn’t afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters’ thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again “crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural” (Washington Post).

A Novel

Late in the Day

The dazzling collection of stories from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day. **WINNER OF THE EDGE HILL SHORT STORY PRIZE** Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby. A housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. A young girl accepts a lift in a car with a group of strangers. An old friend brings bad news to a dinner party. In these gripping and unsettling stories, the ordinary is made extraordinary and the real things that happen to people turn out to be every bit as mysterious as their dreams. ‘These well-turned, exceptionally nuanced pieces are solidly evocative of place, period...and sensory detail’ Sunday Times ‘Few writers give me such consistent pleasure’ Zadie Smith

Bad Dreams and Other Stories

"Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts."--Hilary Mantel From Tessa Hadley, the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past--"one of the greatest stylists alive" (Washington Post)--an enthralling novel that skillfully portrays the dissolution of a family in 1960s England. 1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability--pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis, bookish teenager Colette, golden boy Hugh, and Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. But when the young son of an old friend comes for dinner, and they all drink too much, and at some point in the dark garden the young man kisses Phyllis, something in this bourgeois housewife catches fire. In Free Love Tessa Hadley turns her gaze to the intimate dynamic of a family transformed by betrayal. Hugh closes his mind against his mother, while Colette wants to follow her, in pursuit of her own adventure. And meanwhile there are secrets buried in Roger's past which make Phyllis's acts more entangling and threatening than she could ever have imagined. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the Fischers' upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them. With scalpel-sharp insight, Hadley explores the depths of her characters' interior lives, capturing "the fleeting emotion, the passing, indefinable perception or tiny epiphany" (Wall Street Journal).

Free Love

Clever Girl is an indelible story of one woman’s life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain’s leading literary lights—Tessa Hadley—the author of the New York Times Notable Books Married Love and The London Train. Like Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin, Tessa Hadley brilliantly captures the beauty, innocence, and irony of ordinary lives—an ability to transform the mundane into the sublime that elevates domestic fiction to literary art. Written with the celebrated precision, intensity, and complexity that have marked her previous works, Clever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an English woman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley’s moving novel follows Stella from the shallows of childhood, growing up with a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the murky waters of middle age. Clever Girl is a story vivid in its immediacy and rich in drama—violent deaths, failed affairs, broken dreams, missed chances. Yet it is Hadley’s observations of everyday life, her keen skill at capturing the ways men and women think and feel and relate to one another, that dazzles.

Clever Girl

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships In each of these twelve stories, small events have huge consequences. Heloise’s father died in a car crash when she was a little girl; at a dinner party in her forties, she meets someone connected to that long-ago tragedy. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other. Janie’s bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie’s own age—everything changes when an accident interrupts the wedding party. A daughter caring for her elderly mother during the pandemic becomes obsessed with the woman next door; in the wake of his best friend’s death, a man must reassess his affair with the friend’s wife. Cecilia, a teenager, wakes one morning in Florence on vacation with her parents and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally rich, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. A vital addition to Tessa Hadley’s celebrated body of work, After the Funeral and Other Stories bears out Claire Messud’s observation that “Like Alice Munro, to whom she has more than once been compared, Hadley has the gift of making small canvases inexhaustibly new . . . Compassionate and luminous, Hadley sees them all—or should I say, she sees us all: our travails, our fantasies and our small joys.”

After the Funeral and Other Stories

After the death of his mother, Paul abandons his family to live life on the edge with his daughter from a previous marriage who is pregnant and living in a run-down council flat, while Cora rebels against her marriage and society.

The London Train

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach. Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

Sunstroke and Other Stories

Syskonen

From the Bestselling Author of Late in the Day

"A supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence," (New York Times Book Review), Tessa Hadley is the author of four critically acclaimed novels, including The London Train, a New York Times Notable Book. A regular contributor to The New Yorker, Hadley returns to the short story form in this brilliant collection, her first since the celebrated Sunstroke and Other Stories. Married Love showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.

And Other Stories

Married Love

Joyce Stevenson is thirteen when her widowed mother takes them to live with Aunt Vera, a formidable teacher neglected by her unfaithful husband. Joyce watches the two sisters - her aunt's unbending dedication to the life of the mind, her mother worn down by housework - and thinks that each of them is powerless in her own way. For Joyce, art school provides an escape route, and there she falls in love with one of her teachers. When she marries and has children, she is determined to manage her relationship with a new freedom, and to save herself from the mistakes of the previous generation. But her daughter Zoe, growing up, comes to see Joyce as a bourgeois housewife, and when Zoe has a baby of her own, she demands more from motherhood...

Everything Will Be All Right

The Bunty Club

Silk Brocade

Magdalena Palmer

Amor libre

The Master Bedroom

"With each new book by Tessa Hadley, I grow more convinced that she's one of the greatest stylists alive."--Ron Charles, Washington Post New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice -A Parnassus First Editions Club Pick - Powell's Indispensable Book Club Pick - A Washington Post Notable Book - A Slate Best Book of the Year - A Boston Globe Best Book of the Year - A Bookpage Best Book of the Year The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in the latest from Tessa Hadley, the acclaimed novelist and short story master who "recruits admirers with each book" (Hilary Mantel). Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer's evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three friends find themselves unmoored; all agree that Zach, with his generous, grounded spirit, was the irreplaceable one they couldn't afford to lose. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of loss bringing them closer, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness. Late in the Day explores the complex webs at the center of our most intimate relationships, to expose how, beneath the seemingly dependable arrangements we make for our lives, lie infinite alternate configurations. Ingeniously moving between past and present and through the intricacies of her characters' thoughts and interactions, Tessa Hadley once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post).

"Tessa Hadley recruits admirers with each book. She writes with authority, and with delicacy: she explores nuance, but speaks plainly; she is one of those writers a reader trusts."--Hilary Mantel From the bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London. 1967. While London comes alive with the new youth revolution, the suburban Fischer family seems to belong to an older world of conventional stability: pretty, dutiful homemaker Phyllis is married to Roger, a devoted father with a career in the Foreign Office. Their children are Colette, a bookish teenager, and Hugh, the golden boy. But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family's upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them. With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is an irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our selves - a novel that showcases Hadley's unrivaled ability to "put on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

Tessa Hadley

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