**THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER**Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine are spending a leisure
Tessa Hadley wins the Hawthornden Prize 2016'Few writers give me such consistent pleasure' Zadie SmithFour siblings meet up in their grandparents’ old house for three long, hot summer weeks. But under
"There is something reassuring yet deliciously unexpected about a Tessa Hadley novel." (Helen Brown, Daily Telegraph). Over five novels and two collections of stories Tessa Hadley has earned a reputat
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 he
A New York Times Notable Book of the YearAn NPR Best Book of the YearThe award-winning author of The Past once again "crystallizes the atmosphere of ordinary life in prose somehow miraculous and natur
In her most accessible, commercial novel yet, the “supremely perceptive writer of formidable skill and intelligence (New York Times Book Review) turns her astute eye to a dramatic family reunion, wher
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 way of seeing in which only 'bad' women could be sexual. She reads James's transitional fictions of the 1890s as explorations of how disabling and distorting ideals of women's goodness and purity were learned and perpetuated within English and American cultural processes. These explorations, Hadley argues, liberate James to write the great heterosexual love affairs of the late novels, with their emphasis on the power of pleasure and play: themes which are central to James's ambitious enterprise to represent the privileges and the pains of turn-of-the-century leisure class society.
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
