Promotional Information

The acclaimed second novel from the author of The London Train.

About the Author

Tessa Hadley is the author of eight highly praised novels, Accidents in the Home, which was longlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, Everything Will Be All Right, The Master Bedroom, The London Train, Clever Girl, The Past, Late in the Day, Free Love and three collections of stories, Sunstroke, Married Love and Bad Dreams. She won the Windham Campbell Prize for Fiction in 2016, The Past won the Hawthornden Prize for 2016, and Bad Dreams won the 2018 Edge Hill Short Story Prize. Her stories appear regularly in the New Yorker.

Reviews

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure
*Zadie Smith*

She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today
*Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie*

Bewitchingly compelling... Gloriously addictive, delectably enjoyable... the reader is snared and kept captive to the last... Exquisite
*Guardian*

Hadley's fiction resembles that of Anne Tyler in aiming to illuminate ordinary life
*Sunday Times*

Genuinely exciting
*New Statesman*

Adult/High School-Hadley's domestic novel introduces readers to several generations of women, each one at work to gain independence, sort through personal chaos, and watch the succeeding children mature. The setting is England from the end of World War II through the present; great-aunt Vera and her sister Lil, grandmother Joyce, mother Zoe, and teenage Pearl each gets a whirl at center stage. The robust details of their lives offer a sensual understanding not only of each woman's immediate world, but also of the changes she experiences as she matures. Like Marianne Fredriksson's Hannah's Daughters (Ballantine, 1998), this multigenerational story has strong characters that are easy to differentiate. They invite readers to ally their sympathies with specific women among the cast, making this an easy entr?e for book-discussion groups. The male characters are more than simply foils for the women; they, too, offer a spectrum of approaches to life and self-realization. Overall, there's much here to appeal to those who are more interested in social insight than romance.-Francisca Goldsmith, Berkeley Public Library, CA Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

In this complex, intelligent family epic, Hadley (Accidents in the Home) chronicles the lives of three generations of English women over four decades of social and political change. After her father is killed in WWII, 11-year-old Joyce and her mother, sister and brother go to live with Joyce's stern schoolteacher aunt and her aunt's family. Escaping from this cozy menagerie when she goes away to art college, Joyce, by now a striking, warmhearted redhead ("Men liked Joyce"), falls in love with her married professor, an intense painter who leaves his wife for her. Joyce adapts well to married life (like Mrs. Dalloway, she throws elaborate parties), but her marriage is less conventional than it seems. Her daughter Zoe, quieter and more self-contained, does well at school and goes away to Cambridge, where she studies history and embarks on a tormented relationship with clever, rigid Simon ("you know he never touched me-I mean, literally, even with his hand-except when he wanted to make love to me"). Against Simon's wishes, Zoe has his baby, but shortly after Pearl's birth Zoe leaves him, making a life for herself as a successful conflict expert and academic. Pearl, Zoe's rebellious daughter, has Joyce's red hair but is defiantly herself, reveling in disorder and roving with gangs of friends. The novel itself is an unruly domestic tangle of family members, lovers and friends, crowded and intimate. Cutting abruptly across decades and then zeroing in on a few months or years in the life of its endearingly human protagonists, it expertly captures the texture of daily existence and the struggle of three memorable women to make their way in the world. (Oct.) Forecast: Fans of Margaret Drabble and the Doris Lessing of The Sweetest Dream are the target readership for this thoughtful, analytical domestic novel. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Few writers give me such consistent pleasure -- Zadie Smith
She has such great psychological insights into human beings, which is rare. She is one of the best fiction writers writing today -- Chimamanda Ngozie Adichie
Bewitchingly compelling... Gloriously addictive, delectably enjoyable... the reader is snared and kept captive to the last... Exquisite * Guardian *
Hadley's fiction resembles that of Anne Tyler in aiming to illuminate ordinary life * Sunday Times *
Genuinely exciting * New Statesman *