Bøker av Tessa Hadley

The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: the stories focus in on crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists. an old friend brings bad news to a dinner party;

An irresistible novella about two sisters and a night that changes everything, from the master chronicler of our heart's hidden desiresEvelyn had the surprising thought that bodies were sometimes wiser than the people inside them. She'd have liked to impress somebody with this idea, but couldn't explain it.On a winter Saturday night in post-war Bristol, sisters Moira and Evelyn, students on the cusp of adulthood, go to a party in a dockside pub where they meet two men, Paul and Sinden, who have an air of worldliness and sophistication which both intrigues and repels them. Sinden elicits their phone number, but the sisters don't expect to hear from them again and are surprised when he calls a few days later to invite them to another party, at the crumbling mansion he lives in with Paul. Moira accepts despite Evelyn's misgivings, and as the night unfolds in this unfamiliar, glamorous new setting, the sisters learn things about themselves and each other that both shock and release them into a new phase of their lives.In this exquisite novella of two girls coming of age, Tessa Hadley asks and answers timeless questions about the power of desire - whether for another person, another version of yourself, or life itself.

Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it'FINANCIAL TIMESHeloise'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. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey'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. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on vacation with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality, and dreams.

Sunday Times bestseller Tessa Hadley explores the big consequences of small events in this new collection'You've either got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it' FINANCIAL TIMESHeloise'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. Janey's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janey'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. Teenager Cecilia wakes one morning on holiday with her parents in Florence and sees them for the first time through disenchanted eyes.These stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality, and dreams.***A GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023******ONE OF THE BBC'S '25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023'***

The ?supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence (New York Times Book Review) turns her astute eye to a dramatic family reunion, where simmering tensions and secrets come to a head over three long, hot summer weeks.?A novel so evocative of summer and adolescence that to read it is to reexperience the deep languor and longing of those days.? ? Tayari Jones, O Magazine?Exquisite. . . . For anyone who cherishes Anne Tyler and Alice Munro, the book offers similar deep pleasures.? ? Ron Charles, Washington PostWinner of the Windham Campbell Prize • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • A Time Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Top 10 Book of the Year • A Huffington Post Best Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Editors' Choice Three sisters and a brother, complete with children, a new wife, and an ex-boyfriend's son, descend on their grandparents' dilapidated old home in the Somerset countryside for a final summer holiday. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past?their mother took them there to live when she left their father?but now, they may have to sell it. And beneath the idyllic pastoral surface lie tensions. As the family's stories and silences intertwine over the course of three long, hot weeks, small disturbances build into familial crises, and a way of life?bourgeois, literate, ritualized, Anglican?winds down to its inevitable end.

An indelible story of one woman's life, revealed 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."Clever Girl is...what could be called a 'sensibility' novel--a story that doesn't overreach, about a character who feels real, told in prose that isn't ornate yet is startlingly exact. The effect is a fine and well-chosen pileup of experiences that gather meaning and power."--Meg Wolitzer, New York Times Book ReviewClever Girl is a powerful exploration of family relationships and class in modern life, witnessed through the experiences of an Englishwoman named Stella. Unfolding in a series of snapshots, Tessa Hadley's involving and moving novel follows Stella from childhood, growing up with her single mother in a Bristol bedsit, into the murky waters of middle age. It 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 elevate this tale into "a beautiful and precisely drawn portrait of an everywoman, both extraordinary and ordinary" (Minneapolis Star Tribune).

In this New York Times Notable Book from one of today's most acclaimed writers, two lives stretched between two cities converge in a chance meeting that will irrevocably change their lives. "Hadley is a supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence, someone who goes well beyond surfaces." --New York Times Book ReviewUnsettled 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 excitement at living on the edge. Abandoning his second wife and their children in Wales, he joins her to begin a new life in the heart of London.Cora, meanwhile, is running in the opposite direction, back to Cardiff, to the house she has inherited from her parents. She is escaping her marriage, and the constrictions and disappointments of her life in London. But there is a deeper reason why she cannot stay with her decent Civil Service husband; the aftershocks of which she hasn't fully come to terms with herself.Connecting both stories is the London train, and a chance meeting that will have immediate and far-reaching consequences for both Paul and Cora.

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 MantelFrom 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).

Rivalry, unruly desire and ugly secrets poison a family holiday in this gripping novel from the Sunday Times bestselling author of Late in the Day. 'Few writers give me such consistent pleasure' Zadie SmithFour siblings meet up in their grandparents' old house for three long, hot summer weeks.

Her fiance is Edgar Lennox, a composer of religious music and lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior.It is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties tested but holding, and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments.

Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living with her mother and rather unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of a less ordinary life. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn't realise until it is too late.

From the Sunday Times bestselling author of 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.

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. Adapting to a new way of life, the connections Kate forges in her new home are to have painful consequences, as the past begins to cast its long shadow over the present...

Everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends. 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. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.

An improbable coincidence brings Clare back into contact with someone she once had sex with at a teenage party; Clare is married with three small children, she bakes her own bread and buys her clothes from the charity shop. Clare's story is intertwined with other stories of her extended family.

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.