Description
Book SynopsisSunday 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 TIMES
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. 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.
***A GUARDIAN AND NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023***
***ONE OF THE BBC’S '25 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023'***
Trade ReviewConsistently pulls you in from the first sentence... The capacity to make readers care from the off about what happens to these imaginary people next is
an unquantifiable, indefinable talent that cannot be taught. You've got it or you haven't. Hadley's got it * Financial Times *
One of our finest novelists and a short story supremo... It is hard to imagine stories more skilfully paced and polished than these * Observer *
After the Funeral is a brilliant collection. From the virtuosity of Hadley's technique to the clarity of her moral vision and the warmth of her humour,
what she has achieved in After the Funeral is nothing short of masterful. Her stories are surprising, profound, and each feels as full as a world -- Brandon Taylor, author of The Late Americans
Beautifully done... The strongest stories resonate, offering glimpses of the hidden selves we all conceal * Sunday Times *
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare...
One of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, author of Americanah
Short stories tend to be literary Marmite, but the dozen tales in Hadley's classy new collection are
a testament to the startling power of both their author and the form itself` * Mail on Sunday *
After the Funeral draws us into situations that bear out Tolstoy’s famous line, “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”. Each story explores a way of coping with a peculiar challenge…
Hadley elicits the answer with an acumen that puts her among the great detectives of human nature * New Statesman, *Books of the Year* *
Tessa Hadley is my favourite author -- Kate Atkinson, author of Shrines of Gaiety
Hadley has elevated middle-class domesticity, and the emotional ripples beneath it, into the realms of high art... Her depictions of buried disappointment and quiet yearning are timeless...
A reminder of just how sublime an experience reading a Tessa Hadley book is * i *
Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith, author of White Teeth
