British author Tessa Hadley’s writing just keeps getting better with each successive book that she produces. Her plots focus on families, marital relationships, friendship, and the impact of grief. Her characters are primarily middle-class or upper-middle-class British people who are artists or writers or teachers. I find her prose to be both lucid and rich in its deep searches into motivation, desire, and personality. In this review, I take a look at two of Hadley’s books.

Bad Dreams and Other Stories (2017) is a collection of ten short stories, seven of which appeared previously in the New Yorker magazine. To give you a sense of Hadley’s writing, here are selected quotes from four of the stories:

From “An Abduction” 

“Something was revealed in her that was normally hidden: an auburn light in her face, her freckles startling as the camouflage of an animal, blotting up against her lips and eyelids. . . Her family called her pudgy, but she just looked soft, as if she were longing to nestle.” (9) 

From “Bad Dreams” 

“In the lounge, the child paddled her toes in the hair of the white goatskin rug. Gleaming, uncanny, half reverted to its animal past, the rug yearned to the moon, which was balanced on top of the wall at the back of the paved yard.” (118) 

From “Under the Sign of the Moon”

“All the time he was setting out these platitudes with such solemnity, Greta felt sure that they weren’t the real content of his thoughts, just as her own sceptical, condescending cleverness when she argued with him wasn’t the real content of her thoughts either. This conversation took place on the surface, while their real lives were hidden underground beneath it, crouching, listening out, mutely attentive.” (185) 

From “Silk Brocade”

“.  . . on the white walls there were prints of paintings by Klee and Utrillo and a gilt antique mirror with a plant trailing round it. Morning light waited, importantly empty, in the cheval glass.” (205) 

In Hadley’s 2019 novel, Late in the Day, two couples have been friends for decades and are now in their fifties. At the beginning of the book, Lydia’s husband, Zachary, dies suddenly. In deep shock and grief, Lydia comes to stay with Alex and Christine. Hadley explores how each of the three misses Zachary desperately, but she also delves into the interpersonal relationships of all four characters—relationships that have evolved through many changes in their lives. For this she shifts back and forth in time, looking at pivotal events. Again, I offer some key quotations:

“Marriage simply meant that you hung on to each other through the succession of metamorphoses. Or failed to.” (118)

“Both women felt some balance of power in their lives had been restored in relation to their men, after the initial blow of becoming mother to young babies, which had knocked them back; now their children filled them out rather than depleting them.” (161) 

“And we were terribly bored by the Manifesto, couldn’t understand a word of it, we preferred historical novels, really. (236) 

Earlier short story collections by Tessa Hadley include Sunstroke and Other Stories (2007) and Married Love and Other Stories (2013). Earlier novels are Accidents in the Home (2002), Everything Will Be All Right (2003), The Master Bedroom (2007), The London Train (2011), Clever Girl (2013), The Past (2015), and Free Love (2022). I’ve reviewed Free Love on this blog.

Add some of these titles to your list of books to buy or to request from your library!