Tessa Hadley

In each of the twelve stories in After the Funeral, small events have huge consequences. 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. Two estranged sisters cross paths at a posh hotel and pretend not to recognize each other.

Janie's bohemian mother plans to marry a man close to Janie'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. As psychologically astute as they are emotionally dense, these stories illuminate the enduring conflicts between responsibility and freedom, power and desire, convention and subversion, reality and dreams. 

We follow the story of Stella from her childhood, as the daughter of a single mother in a Bristol bedsit in the 1960s, into the mysterious shallows of her middle age. The story is full of drama – violent deaths, an abrupt end to Stella’s schooldays, and two sons by different fathers who aren’t around to see the boys grow up.

From Tessa Hadley, bestselling author of Late in the Day and The Past, comes a compulsive new novel about one woman's sexual and intellectual awakening in 1960s London

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.

But when the twenty-something son of an old friend pays the Fischers a visit one hot summer evening, and kisses Phyllis in the dark garden after dinner, something in her catches fire. Newly awake to the world, Phyllis makes a choice that defies all expectations of her as a wife and a mother. Nothing in these ordinary lives is so ordinary after all, it turns out, as the family's upheaval mirrors the dramatic transformation of the society around them.

With scalpel-sharp insight, Tessa Hadley explores her characters' inner worlds, laying bare their fears and longings. Daring and sensual, Free Love is a compulsive, irresistible exploration of romantic love, sexual freedom and living out the truest and most meaningful version of our lives.

Alexandr, Christine, Zachary and Lydia have been close friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later Alex and Christine receive a call from a distraught Lydia. Zach is dead. In the wake of this profound loss, the three of them find over the following months that it warps their relationships, as old entanglements and grievances rise from the past, and love and sorrow give way to anger and bitterness.

Lottie announces that she is getting married. 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.

Three sisters and a brother meet up in their grandparents’ old house one summer. The house is full of memories of their childhood and their past, but now they may have to sell it. Secrets are uncovered and passions erupt as a way of life – bourgeois, literate, ritualised – winds down to its inevitable end.

Discover this brooding collection of short stories from one of Britain's finest writers. A world where everyday life crackles with the electricity sparking between men and women, between parents and children, between friends.

A son confesses to his mother that he is cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with her lecturer and embarks on an affair with a man in the pub who looks just like him. Young mothers pent-up in childcare dream treacherously of other possibilities; a boy becomes aware of the woman, a guest at his parents' holiday home, who is pressing up too close against him on the beach.

Hidden away inside the present, the past is explosive; the future can open unexpectedly out of any chance encounter; ordinary moments are illuminated with lightning flashes of dread or pleasure. These stories about family life are somehow undomesticated and dangerous.