Tessa Hadley

"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. When the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis...

"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."--

Follows Stella, a lower-middle-class British girl born in the 1950s, whose coming-of-age experiences mirror the broader cultural development of her times.

"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...

A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied? So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that...

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...

Lottie announces that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. Her fiancé is Edgar Lennox, a lecturer at Lottie's university, forty-five years her senior. We follow as Lottie's life unfolds; it is a story of romantic dreams and daily reality, family loyalties and the comedy and solace to be found in small moments.

Nanda Gray, the daughter of a Catholic convert, is nine when she is sent to the Convent of Five Wounds. Quick-witted, resilient and eager to please, she accepts this closed world where, with all the enthusiasm of the outsider, her desires and passions become only those the school permits. Her only deviation from total obedience is the passionate friendships she makes. Convent life is perfectly captured - the smell of beeswax and incense; the petty...

Chapter 38 of Charlotte Brontë's novel, Jane Eyre, opens with the line "Reader, I married him." Now twenty women authors have spun original stories using that line as inspiration for this collection of unique, inventive, and poignant stories. This collection of original stories by today's finest women writers--including Tracy Chevalier, Francine Prose, Elizabeth McCracken, Tessa Hadley, Audrey Niffenegger, and more--takes inspiration from the opening...