Most Popular Books by Tessa Hadley

A masterful collection of stories that plumb the depths of everyday life to reveal the shifting tides and hidden undercurrents of ordinary relationships—Tessa Hadley is "one of the greatest stylists alive" (Ron Charles, Washington Post). A Best Book of the Year: TIME, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, Vogue “Hadley is pure magic and After the Funeral is a triumph.”—Lily King, New York Times best-selling author of Writers & Lovers and Euphoria 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 showcases what Colm Tóibín describes as "Tessa Hadley''s extraordinary skill at making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive."

Rivalry, unruly desire and ugly secrets poison a family holiday in this gripping novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love and Late in the Day. ''Few writers give me such consistent pleasure'' Zadie Smith Four siblings meet up in their grandparents'' old house for three long, hot summer weeks. But under the idyllic surface lie shattering tensions. Roland has come with his new wife, and his sisters don''t like her. Fran has brought her children, who soon uncover an ugly secret in a ruined cottage in the woods. Alice has invited Kasim, an outsider, who makes plans to seduce Roland''s teenage daughter. And Harriet, the eldest, finds her quiet self-possession ripped apart when passion erupts unexpectedly. Over the course of the holiday, a familiar way of life falls apart forever. ''Exquisite'' The Times ''Wonderful'' Guardian ''Magnificent'' Sunday Times

''Unflinching, intelligent and fascinating.'' Marian Keyes The lives of two close-knit couples are irrevocably changed by an untimely death in this Sunday Times bestselling novel. Alex and Christine and Zach and Lydia have been inseparable since their twenties. From student house-shares and grubby pubs to proper homes and grown-up careers, the two couples'' lives have been interlinked for decades. Then one evening, Alex and Christine receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. Inconsolable, Lydia moves in with Alex and Christine. But instead of their loss bringing them closer, the three of them find that love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness as old entanglements and resentments rise from the past. ''A fine-grained novel of friendship, loss and jealousy.'' Sunday Times, 100 Great 21-Century Novels ‘Hadley brings the gifts of a still-life painter to her fiction yet manages to produce satisfying twists and turns to her storytelling.’ New Statesman

"First published in the United States by Henry Holt and Company"--Title page verso.

A single woman at loose ends becomes the object of two men''s affections—a father and his teenage son—in this sly, richly drawn novel, The Master Bedroom After more than twenty years in London, Kate Flynn has returned to her family home in Wales to care for her aging mother. Having cast off her academic career, she is unmoored, and when she runs into a childhood friend, David Roberts, at a concert, she finds herself falling for him, although she knows she''s grasping at anything to fill the sudden emptiness of her life. For his part, David''s marriage isn''t as solid as it looks—his wife, Suzie, has begun acting strangely, moving out of their bedroom, neglecting their children, and disappearing for days at a time—and he begins to seek refuge with Kate from the newfound chaos of his life. David''s seventeen-year-old son, Jamie, is also drawn to Kate''s eccentricity and her strange, glamorous old house full of books and music and history. As both father and son set about their parallel courtships, Tessa Hadley''s intricate, graceful novel explores the tangled web of connections between parents and children, revealing how each generation replays the stories of the one that came before, in new and sometimes startling patterns.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of Free Love and Late in the Day, discover a story of two lives stretched between two cities, two stories bound by the London train. Paul sets out in search of his eldest daughter Pia, who has gone missing somewhere in London. At first he thinks he wants to rescue her, but as time passes he is drawn deeper into the excitements of the capital, and a life lived in jeopardy, he forgets his own way home. In the opposite direction, Cora is moving back to Cardiff, to the house she inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage and the disappointments of her London life. And then she receives a telephone call to say that her husband has disappeared... ''She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today'' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

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.

A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley''s stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that that lie hidden inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son''s confession that he''s cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley''s Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.

Winner of the Edge Hill Short Story Prize A New York Times Notable Book of the Year An NPR Best Book of the Year The award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natural" (Washington Post), in a collection of stories that elevate the mundane into the exceptional. The author of six critically acclaimed novels, Tessa Hadley has proven herself to be the champion of revealing the hidden depths in the deceptively simple. In these short stories it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric or a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, made strange by the darkness; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: each of these stories illuminate crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. A girl accepts a lift in a car with some older boys; a young woman reads the diaries she discovers while housesitting. Small acts have large consequences, some that can reverberate across decades; private fantasies can affect other people, for better and worse. The real things that happen to people, the accidents that befall them, are every bit as mysterious as their longings and their dreams. Bad Dreams and Other Stories demonstrates yet again that Tessa Hadley "puts on paper a consciousness so visceral, so fully realized, it heightens and expands your own. She is a true master" (Lily King, author of Euphoria).

A powerful literary debut chronicles a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family--a web of marriages, divorces, half siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal.

A glorious celebration of reading deeply and seeing the world and ourselves reflected back to us in art ''It will remain my writing and reading companion for years, probably always'' SAMANTHA HARVEY ''Tessa Hadley is a great writer, and if it''s possible, an even better reader'' ZADIE SMITH In this rich and engaging collection of essays, Tessa Hadley reflects on a lifetime of reading with the clarity and perceptiveness that have made her one of our most widely loved contemporary writers. She charts her development as a lover of literature from a book-mad childhood shaped by libraries and imaginary worlds, through the long, uncertain years of writing and teaching, to the mature artistic vision that defines her work today. Here, Tessa Hadley turns to writers as varied as George Eliot and George Saunders, Tolstoy and Elizabeth Bowen, and looks closely at a handful of paintings. Throughout, her sharp eye, precise judgement, and instinct for style guides the reader towards the pleasures found in each text, and in a life made richer, deeper, and more fully imagined through art. ''The writer we didn''t know we were waiting for, until she arrived'' ANNE ENRIGHT ''Tessa Hadley''s extraordinary skill [is] making both surface life and deep interiors come fully alive'' COLM TOIBIN Includes stunning full-colour images

“Exquisite." —Minneapolis Star Tribune • "Brilliantly observed.” — People, Pick of the Week “A beguiling novel, deceptively easy to read; beneath the surface swim disturbing and age-old questions about freedom and fate.” — 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).

"Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity. . . . Extraordinarily well-made." — New York Times Book Review 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 unflinching examinations of family relationships. Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents'' party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets. Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect. "Hadley parses the meaning of love in all its paradoxical, panoramic glory." — Booklist "These stories are gemlike and unforgettable." —Kate Tuttle, Boston Globe "One of the most interesting writers around." —Philip Womack, The Spectator "Only Alice Munro and Colm Tóibin . . . are so adept at portraying whole lives in a few thousand words. . . . Hadley joins their company as one of the most clear-sighted chroniclers of contemporary emotional journeys." —Edmund Gordon, The Guardian "There is a grand sweep and an emotional charge that brings to mind DH Lawrence." —Elena Seymenliyska, Daily Telegraph (London)) "An exceptional storyteller." — Library Journal "Shrewd, insightful, unpredictable." — Kirkus Reviews

A short story by Tessa Hadley from the collection Reader, I Married Him: Stories inspired by Jane Eyre.

Short story writers often say that, for maximum dramatic effect, you should arrive fashionably late to a scene. After years of living in the literary wilderness, it seems the short story’s own moment has finally arrived. The last twelve months have marked an extraordinary year for the form. The Nobel Prize for Literature, the Man Booker International Prize, the Folio Prize and the Independent Foreign Fiction Prize were all awarded to short story writers. The shortlist for the BBC National Short Story Award 2014 captures the spirit of this mood and the short story’s knack for cutting straight to the action, the all-important moment of change. The five stories on this year’s shortlist were chosen by a panel of judges that included: poet and novelist Adam Foulds; author, illustrator and performer Laura Dockrill; editor Philip Gwyn Jones; BBC Editor of Books Di Speirs; and the broadcaster Alan Yentob, who chaired the panel and introduces this collection.