Unsettled by the recent death of his mother, Paul sets out in search of Pia, his daughter from his first marriage, who has disappeared into the labyrinth of London. Discovering her pregnant and living illegally in a run-down council flat with a pair of Polish siblings, Paul is entranced by Pia's exc[...]
Married Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today's most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinchin[...]
Clare is married, with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Her best friend Helly is a model and has her golden curves pasted up on billboards ten feet high. Each of them seems to want what the other has.[...]
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 i[...]
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[...]
Kate Flynn has always been a clever girl, brought up to believe in herself as something special. Now Kate is forty-three and has given up her university career in London to come home and look after her mother at Firenze, their big house by a lake in Cardiff. When Kate meets David Roberts, a friend f[...]
Paul lives in the Welsh countryside with his wife Elise, and their two young children. One day he learns that his eldest daughter Pia, who was living with his ex-wife in London, has moved out from home and gone missing. He sets out in search of Pia. But the search for his daughter begins a period of[...]
Follows the story of Stella, from her childhood as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s into the shallows of her middle age. This title is full of drama - violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella's schooldays, and two sons by different fathers who aren't around to see the [...]
All the qualities that readers praised in "The London Train" are present in "Clever" Girl, Tessa Hadley's brilliant new novel. It follows the story of Stella, from her childhood as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The st[...]
Tessa Hadley examines how Henry James progressively disentangled himself from the moralizing frame through which English-language novels in the nineteenth century had imagined sexual passion. Hadley argues that his relationship with the European novel tradition was crucial, helping to leave behind a[...]