Background
Tessa Hadley was born on February 28, 1956, in Bristol, United Kingdom. She is the daughter of Geoff, a teacher, shopkeeper, and jazz trumpeter and Mary Nichols.
Trinity Ln, Cambridge CB2 1TL, United Kingdom
In 1978 Tessa graduated from Clare College with a Bachelor of Arts.
Bath BA2 9BN, United Kingdom
Tessa studied at Bath Spa University, receiving a Master of Arts in creative writing in 1994.
UWE Bristol - Frenchay Campus, Coldharbour Ln, Bristol BS16 1QY, United Kingdom
Tessa got a Doctor of Philosophy in 1998 from the University of the West of England.
Photo of Tessa Hadley
Photo of Tessa Hadley
Photo of Tessa Hadley
Tessa Hadley
Photo of Tessa Hadley
(Collects folk tales from around the world that attempt to...)
Collects folk tales from around the world that attempt to explain the existence and characteristics of the sun and moon.
https://www.amazon.com/Legends-Sun-Moon-Cambridge/dp/0521379121/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Legends+of+the+Sun+and+Moon&qid=1597843747&sr=8-1
1983
(A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life ...)
A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life of one thoroughly modern family Clare Verey, a twenty-nine-year-old mother of three, bakes her own bread and grinds her own spices. She has a comfortable home in the suburbs and a devoted husband. Why is it, then, that when her best friend's lover appears in her life he has the power to invert her world? Why is the desire for more never satisfied? So begins Accidents in the Home, a novel that exposes the emotional underbelly of a modern-day family. Clare's narrative is deftly intertwined with the stories of her extended family: her mother, Marian, the clever daughter of a Dostoevsky scholar whose husband leaves her for a beautiful young art student; Clare's half brother, Toby, a dreamy boy who prefers to view life through the lens of a camera; her troubled younger half-sister, Tamsin, who develops an apparatus of taboos and rituals to restore order to her chaotic past. In the world Tessa Hadley has created, family is no longer a steady foundation but a complex web of marriages, divorces, half-siblings, and stepchildren that expands with every new connection and betrayal. Accidents in the Home offers a startling, intimate portrait of family life in our time.
https://www.amazon.com/Accidents-Home-Novel-Tessa-Hadley-ebook/dp/B009E6VZRI/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Accidents+in+the+home+%3A+a+novel&qid=1597843360&sr=8-1
2002
(The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daug...)
The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daughter infuse this rich, expansive novel with both intimate detail and wide resonance When Joyce Stevenson is thirteen, her family moves to the south of England to live with their aunt Vera. Joyce's mother, Lil, is a widow; Vera has a husband who keeps his suits in the wardrobe but spends evenings at another house nearby. While the two sisters couldn't be more different-Vera, a teacher, has unquestioning belief in the powers of education and reason; Lil puts her faith in séances-they work together to form a tight-knit family. Joyce sees that there is something missing in their lives: men. She doesn't want to end up like her aunt Vera, rejected by her husband.
https://www.amazon.com/Everything-Will-Be-All-Right-ebook/dp/B009OZN7UM/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Everything+will+be+all+right&qid=1597843388&sr=8-2
2003
(A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace...)
A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace the currents of desire, desperation, and mischief that lie hid inside domestic relationships. A mother hears her son's confession that he's cheating on his girlfriend; a student falls in love with a professor and initiates an affair with a man who looks just like him. A boy on a seaside vacation realizes that a grown-up woman is pressing dangerously close. In Tessa Hadley's Sunstroke and Other Stories, everyone conspires to hold the loving and stable surface of family life together, as old secrets and new appetites threaten to blow it apart.
https://www.amazon.com/Sunstroke-Other-Stories-Tessa-Hadley/dp/0312425996/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Sunstroke+and+other+stories&qid=1597843800&sr=8-2
2007
(Two lives, stretched between two cities, converge in a ch...)
Two lives, stretched between two cities, converge in a chance meeting with immediate and far-reaching consequences in this compelling, sophisticated tale from acclaimed New Yorker writer Tessa Hadley, author of Accidents in the Home and The Master Bedroom. A father struggles to reestablish a relationship with his estranged daughter in London, surrendering himself to an underground life of illegal squats and counterculture friendships, a wife decides she must flee her suffocating marriage to return to Wales, wherein Cardiff she may rediscover the passions that once fueled her life. Embracing change and facing loss, in a story evocative of Alice Munro’s Runaway and Julia Glass’ I See You Everywhere, Hadley’s powerful characters illuminate the furthest reaches of love, hope, and determination.
https://www.amazon.com/London-Train-Tessa-Hadley-ebook/dp/B004FEF6PG/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+The+London+train&qid=1597843460&sr=8-1
2011
(Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living wit...)
Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living with her mother and rather an unsatisfactory stepfather in suburban respectability she reads voraciously, smokes until her voice is hoarse and dreams of less ordinary life. When she meets Val, he seems to her to embody everything she longs for - glamour, ideas, excitement, and the thrill of the unknown. But these things come at a price and one that Stella despite all her cleverness doesn’t realize until it is too late.
https://www.amazon.com/Clever-Girl-Novel-P-S-Paperback/dp/0062282883/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Clever+girl&qid=1597843528&sr=8-2
2013
(A girl haunts the edges of her parents' party; a film dir...)
A girl haunts the edges of her parents' party; a film director drops dead, leaving his film unfinished and releasing his wife to a new life; an eighteen-year-old insists on marrying her music professor, then finds herself shut out from his secrets; three friends who were intimate as teenagers meet up again after the death of the women who brought them together. Ranging widely across generations and classes, and evoking a world that expands beyond the pages, these are the stories of Tessa Hadley's astonishing new collection.
https://www.amazon.com/Married-Love-Stories-Tessa-Hadley-ebook/dp/B007HB845I/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Married+love&qid=1597843841&sr=8-2
2013
(Three adult sisters and their brother meet up at their gr...)
Three adult sisters and their brother meet up at their grandparents' country home for their annual family holiday - three long, hot summer weeks. The beloved but crumbling house is full of memories of their childhood - of when their mother took them to stay with her parents when she left their father - but this could be their last summer in the house, now they may have to sell it. And under the idyllic pastoral surface, there are tensions.
https://www.amazon.com/Past-Novel-Tessa-Hadley-ebook/dp/B00WQZSCPM/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+The+past&qid=1597843598&sr=8-2
2015
(In these short stories, it’s the ordinary things that tur...)
In these short stories, it’s the ordinary things that turn out to be most extraordinary: the history of a length of fabric, say, and a forgotten jacket. Two sisters quarrel over an inheritance and a new baby; a child awake in the night explores the familiar rooms of her home, strange in the dark; a housekeeper caring for a helpless old man uncovers secrets from his past. The first steps into a turning point and a new life are made so easily and carelessly: the stories focus on crucial moments of transition, often imperceptible to the protagonists.
https://www.amazon.com/Dreams-Other-Stories-Tessa-Hadley/dp/006247667X/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Bad+dreams+and+other+stories&qid=1597843900&sr=8-2
2017
(Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been fr...)
Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been friends since they first met in their twenties. Thirty years later, Alex and Christine are spending a leisurely summer evening at home when they receive a call from a distraught Lydia: she is at the hospital. Zach is dead.
https://www.amazon.com/Late-Day-Novel-Tessa-Hadley/dp/006247670X/ref=sr_1_2?dchild=1&keywords=Tessa+Hadley+Late+in+the+day&qid=1597843684&sr=8-2
2019
Tessa Hadley was born on February 28, 1956, in Bristol, United Kingdom. She is the daughter of Geoff, a teacher, shopkeeper, and jazz trumpeter and Mary Nichols.
In 1978 Tessa graduated from Clare College with a Bachelor of Arts. She then studied at Bath College of Higher Education, now Bath Spa University, receiving a Master of Arts in creative writing in 1994 and a Doctor of Philosophy in 1998 from the University of the West of England.
Tessa Hadley has contributed short stories to The New Yorker since 2002, when her first novel, "Accidents in the Home," was long-listed for the Guardian First Book Award. This is the story of Clare, a self- proclaimed frumpy mother of three who feigns contentment in a hollow marriage. One day, her longtime friend Helly appears with Helly's new boyfriend. David. David turns out to be someone the teenaged Clare once shared a wild night with at a party, and she is now shocked when he shows her an earring of hers he has kept as a secret memento of the occasion. The sudden reappearance of David in her life gives Clare pause. Meanwhile, Clare's husband Bram initiates an affair with Helly, and the lives of these characters are forever changed.
Since then, Hadley has published six highly praised novels. "The London Train" (2011) is a story about a man who struggles to reestablish a relationship with his estranged daughter in London, surrendering himself to an underground life of illegal squats and counterculture friendships. In 2013 Tessa published "Clever Girl," an indelible story of one woman's life, unfolded in a series of beautifully sculpted episodes that illuminate an era, moving from the 1960s to today, from one of Britain's leading literary lights. Her next novel was "The Past" (2015), a mesmerizing novel about family and the modern world encroaching upon the old, and most recently, "Late in the Day" (2019). The story is about two couples living in London in their late middle age, as well as a small number of their children and hangers-on. They have known each other, in various configurations, most of their adult lives. And it's the end of one of these lives that precipitates the drama. Zachary, a wealthy gallery owner, suddenly drops down dead, leaving his wife Lydia to be cared for by Alex, a primary school head, and his wife Christine, a moderately successful painter.
She is also the author of three short-story collections, "Sunstroke," "Married Love," and "Bad Dreams and Other Stories."
Hadley publishes reviews for the Guardian and the London Review of Books and is a Professor of Creative Writing at Bath Spa University.
(A girl haunts the edges of her parents' party; a film dir...)
2013(Two lives, stretched between two cities, converge in a ch...)
2011(The profoundly different choices of a mother and her daug...)
2003(A powerful literary debut chronicling a year in the life ...)
2002(In these short stories, it’s the ordinary things that tur...)
2017(A Picador Paperback Original Tessa Hadley's stories trace...)
2007(Three adult sisters and their brother meet up at their gr...)
2015(Collects folk tales from around the world that attempt to...)
1983(Alexandr and Christine and Zachary and Lydia have been fr...)
2019(Stella was a clever girl, everyone thought so. Living wit...)
2013Tessa Hadley's great success as a novelist lies in the way she conforms to received ideas of good writing. Rather than trying to "make it new" by blurring the distinctions between fiction and autobiography, for instance, or following other recent trends of a broadly Sebaldian nature, she delivers clear narrative lines, creates strongly visualized characters who speak in coherent sentences, and concentrates on the familiarly recurring patterns of human experience. Generally, she examines her characters with an unusual degree of psychological subtlety. Her particular strength is to combine a deep excavation of human frailty with compassion for its effects.
In 1982 Tessa married Eric Hadley. The couple has three sons.