Publisher Description

Tessa Hadley has joined the ranks of Posy Simmonds, Helen Simpson, Colm Toibin, Katherine Mansfield and Rachel Cusk as a national treasure.The new collection of short stories from award-winning author Tessa Hadley.Lottie announces at the breakfast table that she is getting married. The youngest daughter of a large and close-knit family, Lottie is nineteen but looks five years younger. 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. Evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, it marks the beginning of what is an astonishing collection to treasure.

Notes

A wonderful new collection of short stories from one of the most accomplished storytellers of today. Hadley should be praised for her unflinching examination of family relationships, her humour, and her powerful and precise prose. In this new miscellany there are domestic dramas, generational sagas and wrenching love affairs, distilled to remarkable effect.

Author Biography

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, Free Love and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Review

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
The stories collected in Married Love tend to announced themselves with a crash ... before resolving into quieter reflections, like musical overtures in which strings follow brass. Whether it is in examining the mellowing of a marriage in the title piece, or recounting the progress of a one night stand ("In the Cave"), Hadley writes of ordinary lives with a gracefulness unequalled among her peers * Independent on Sunday *
Occasionally – very occasionally – a book feels like a gift, something unexpected, exhilarating, life-enhancing. Tessa Hadley's second collection of short stories is such a book * The Times *
One of the most subtle and sublime contemporary writers * Vogue *

Promotional

Tessa Hadley has joined the ranks of Posy Simmonds, Helen Simpson, Colm Toibin, Katherine Mansfield and Rachel Cusk as a national treasure.

Review Text

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure

Review Quote

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure

Promotional "Headline"

Tessa Hadley has joined the ranks of Posy Simmonds, Helen Simpson, Colm Toibin, Katherine Mansfield and Rachel Cusk as a national treasure.

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